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  • 2022-05-17 (xsd:date)
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  • Were Australian Lawmakers Considering Ban on People Growing Food? (en)
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  • In April 2022, a lengthy piece of text claiming that officials in the Australian state of Victoria were pushing legislation that would ban people from growing food circulated on conspiratorial websites, which presented the alleged bill as a nefarious plot to starve Australian citizens. The headline of an article on XYZ.Net.au, for example, read: Psychopath Daniel Andrews (Premier of Victoria) Plans To STARVE Victorians. On social media, the claim was boiled down to digestible memes and brief tweets, including the following: The claim was not true, however. This rumor centered on a genuine proposal by Victorian lawmakers called the Agriculture Legislation Amendment Bill 2022. That bill — which had bipartisan support, as of this writing — dealt with invasive species and other potential threats to Australia's agriculture industry. In a fact sheet about the bill, the state government explained its purpose and addressed the false claim that the legislation would prohibit Australians from growing their own food: Professor Paul Martin, director of the Australian Centre for Agriculture and Law, told AAP FactCheck: Reuters spoke to a Victoria Government spokesperson, who also said of the bill: No one will be prevented from growing their own food as part of these changes. The news agency continued: The claim that Australian lawmakers were considering the purported food-growing ban was shared in articles that also pushed other debunked conspiracy theories. The article on XYZ.Net.Au, for example, falsely claimed that there had been an unusual amount of fires at food processing plants this year and that the U.S. government was paying people to destroy crops. While the rumor about Australian legislation gained traction on social media, it reached a larger audience thanks to podcast host Joe Rogan. In an episode that aired in mid-May 2022, he talked about the claim like Australian officials really were pushing a policy package that would prohibit people from growing their own food. Then, another person on mic presumably looked up online whether any reputable news outlets had reported on the alleged initiative and came up empty. In other words, the conspiratorial podcast was once again spreading misinformation. It's important to note that this claim was part of a baseless conspiracy theory that the government (either Australia's or the United States' or the New World Order) was purposefully creating a food shortage in order to starve people so that a nefarious group of elites could enslave them. These conspiracy theories are often connected to white supremacist ideals as they pit regular Australian farmers attempting to grow their own food against others who are competing for the food supply. The XYZ article, for example, ended like this: We’ll also need to defend our food supply, and a network of solid friends to help us. Time to tribe up, White man. (en)
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