I think reducing the harms that are done by trolls and various other bad actors on the internet is an important question for this era. But this might not be the main motivation behind these new proposals. One of the most concerning parts of this is that the rules around what trolling is and who gets to determine who is a troll have not been a prominent part of the discussion. There's important recent political context here that international readers may be missing, the current federal government campaigned at the last election with a promise to introduce a independent federal anti-corruption commission but in recent times has completely backflipped on this (
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/morrison-must-honour...). Australia's mass media ownership is remarkably centralized with Murdoch owning an extremely high percentage of the print media in the country (
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-14/fact-file-rupert-murd...). This has led to a number of high profile people including two former prime ministers from both side of the political divide to speak out and say there's a major problem (
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/apr/21/forme...). This is also why we had that legislation that aimed to force social media to pay the print media for links, there's very clear evidence that the Murdoch media machine has very deep influence with the current system of Australian politics. This is relevant because for many years this same media organization was being exceedingly supportive of the Berejiklian government in NSW and was actively avoiding reporting on their corruption and generally reported in a persistent positively biased way on certain people in that government (and important to note that this positive reporting was done on people who's conduct wasn't ethical). As a result a lot of local populace just simply didn't know how bad things were, discussions on other non-Murdoch media and social media was the way in which many people became aware of just how bad the corruption really was in NSW. I mean sure you didn't have to dig that hard, or maybe even at all, because the deputy premier liked to boast about how he engaged in pork barrelling and other such conduct (for foreign readers, this is not satire or an exaggeration, he literally used to openly claim this as a badge of honor:
https://happymag.tv/barilaro-blue-mountains-bushfire-relief-...). But the corruption was by Australian standard bad:
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/10/australia-nsw-premier-berejik..., had it been other politicians involved it would have been in the newspapers frequently. Once news of this finally got out this eventually led to the leaders of the NSW State government being ousted. The persistent corruption and unethical behavior of a small group was brought into the open by an investigation of the NSW anti-corruption commission and the news was impossible to ignore at this point. This episode also involved the arrest without a warrant (with proper process not being followed, the questioning of the attorney general about this is entirely worth watching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcKBDveFXCU) of a journalist who was investigating this corruption. There was also a defamation case brought up by the deputy premier against a Youtuber who was documenting the corruption of the deputy premier. After the scandal was well and truly out in the open the deputy premier resigned and settled the defamation case as a defense based on truth of claims looked fairly certain to prevail and the political backing he once had was gone (
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-05/john-barilaro-settles...). Since this episode of NSW politics has unfolded the pushes to have a federal independent corruption commission have once again been prevented from moving forward. The main thing that concerns many people is that these defamation laws might in practice be used only to silence people talking about corruption and other political opponents much like what was seen very recently in 2021 in NSW. It is entirely possible that the stated aim of reducing harm to people in the community won't actually be a priority here at all. Hopefully an informed discussion can be had here and good laws can be created, there's most certainly issues with trolls and various bad faith actors online so hopefully good policy can be made in this space.