Australia's National Media Literacy Strategy - Not Everything Is a Skills Gap

When Capability Replaced Accountability

This fortnight, the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is conducting its third block of public hearings. Its subject is the dissemination of antisemitic and other hateful content, not only online, but through traditional media and broadcasting. A Royal Commission, established in the aftermath of the Bondi attack and required to report by 14 December, is spending two weeks examining how Australia’s information institutions spread the material that corrodes social cohesion.

In the same week, the South Australian government announced $2.6 million over four years to put the Newshounds media literacy program into all 434 of the state’s primary schools — a nation-first, announced by the Premier as a response to “the rise of populism and spread of misinformation”.

Within days, Liberal Senator Alex Antic had published a broadside calling the program “narrative control” and “propaganda” — training children to defer to approved sources.

—> Read more: Social Media Literacy or Narrative Control? Inside Labor’s $2.6M Initiative

The Commonwealth has committed to developing Australia's first National Media Literacy Strategy. At the same time, draft legislation establishing a Digital Duty of Care is expected later this year. Together, these two reforms will quietly determine who carries responsibility for Australia's information environment over the next decade: how much falls on citizens, and how much falls on the institutions that shape it.

Three events. One news cycle. One obvious question nobody asked.:

while a Royal Commission takes sworn evidence about institutions spreading division, why is the flagship policy response to train nine-year-olds to spot it?

To answer that question, you have to go back to 2024.

What actually happened, stripped of spin

In November 2024, the Albanese government withdrew its misinformation bill after it collapsed in the Senate. The bill would have forced platforms to manage misinformation risk, with fines of up to 5% of global revenue. It was killed by an unusual alliance of the Coalition, the Greens, and crossbenchers including David Pocock — for a defensible reason: the bill asked a government agency to judge what was true, and reasonable people did not trust any government with that power. What happened next is the part that goes unexamined.

Following the collapse of the misinformation bill, media literacy quickly became the Government’s most visible response.

At the same time, it began developing a Digital Duty of Care that takes a different approach: regulating systems rather than individual pieces of content.

Both reforms move in the right direction. The problem is that they are evolving separately. Democratic resilience depends on citizen capability and institutional accountability reinforcing one another, not developing as parallel policy agendas.

The South Australian announcement illustrates why this matters. Newshounds was originally funded by Google. As that funding ends, the state is stepping in to continue the program. It is another investment in citizen capability. Nothing about that is problematic. The question is whether equivalent attention is being given to the institutional settings that shape the information environment those students will inherit.

What the critics got right

It is worth being fair to every camp in this debate, because each one holds a piece of the truth.

Senator Antic is wrong about media literacy itself. This is not guesswork; it has been tested. When researchers show people how manipulation actually works — how a doctored image spreads, how a headline is engineered to provoke, how an algorithm decides what appears in their feed — those people get measurably better at spotting the same tricks afterwards. The effect is real, repeatable and well documented. And multicultural communities have been asking for exactly this kind of training for years, in their own languages, long before it became fashionable policy.

But he is right about one thing, and it should sting: The moment the South Australian Premier framed critical thinking as a weapon against one side of politics, the program became politically vulnerable. Its opponents no longer had to debate the policy—they simply had to argue it was ideological. Programs like this only succeed when they are trusted across the political spectrum. That trust was undermined from the outset.

The critics who killed the 2024 bill on free-speech grounds were also right about the main thing - no government agency should be handed the power to decide what is true. The communities I work with know better than most, that powers over free-speech, once created, tend to be pointed at minorities first.

And the government is right that skills matter. The strongest evidence comes from the United Kingdom, where the media regulator has studied this closely: media literacy training genuinely helps — but it helps most when platforms are also required to show users where content comes from. Even there, a parliamentary review this year found the sector patchy, underfunded and rarely evaluated. In short: teaching the skill works. It just cannot work alone.

What everyone is missing

The national conversation is stuck on the wrong question: whether media literacy programs are education or indoctrination. The right question is simpler. When something in the system causes harm, does government fix the system — or just train people to cope with it?

Think about this. We do not respond to fraud by asking every citizen to become a forensic accountant; we also prosecute fraud. We do not respond to contaminated food by teaching households to detect salmonella; we regulate producers. We do not respond to dangerous cars only with defensive-driving courses; we impose safety standards on manufacturers. The point is, in every other area of policy, responsibility is shared — people build skills, and institutions face rules and the balance is chosen deliberately.

On the matter of misinformation, Australia has ended up funding defensive-driving lessons while refusing to regulate the brakes. And it got there not because anyone chose it, but because it was what remained after the bill died. It is easy to see why governments keep resurfacing this path. A literacy program costs little and generates a friendly announcement — South Australia’s entire four-year schools commitment is just $2.6 million. Regulating the machinery of amplification means a fight with the world’s largest companies and a free-speech brawl the government has already lost once.

Pushing responsibility onto citizens is the easiest political path, dressed up as empowerment.

There is a name for this shift: responsibility laundering. And notice who ends up holding the load. More than 5.5 million Australians speak a language other than English at home. Many rely on in-language news moving through WhatsApp, WeChat and community platforms — exactly the channels where moderation is weakest, sources are hardest to trace, and a bad translation alone can create misinformation. The people being asked to carry the heaviest burden of discernment are the people the system protects least.

3 design flaws in the national conversation follow from this. Each flaw points to something fixable.

—>Design flaw 1: Capability became the default response

No minister has ever argued that Australia’s misinformation problem is primarily a deficit in citizens’ skills. That claim has never really been made because it is difficult to defend. Instead, it has emerged through a series of funding and policy decisions made since the misinformation bill collapsed in 2024. Media literacy became the default response without governments ever explaining why capability should take precedence over institutional reform.

The flaw is not that governments have invested in media literacy. The flaw is that they have never explained why citizen capability became the primary response while institutional accountability remained secondary. Governments should not be able to transfer responsibility to citizens without first explaining what responsibilities were placed on institutions, why those measures were considered insufficient, and why capability-building is expected to succeed where regulation did not. Not every democratic failure is a skills gap. Sometimes it is a governance gap. Good policy should distinguish between the two.

—>Design flaw 2: Media literacy has been separated from democratic capability

Set the politics aside for a moment and ask a more basic question: what is media literacy actually for?

Not to spot fake news. That is a technique, not a purpose.

Its purpose is to help citizens make democratic judgements: to weigh competing claims, assess evidence, understand institutions and decide how to act. But judgement needs context. If a citizen does not understand how Parliament works, how public decisions are made, what regulators do, or how to influence government, what exactly are they evaluating information for? They can identify misinformation perfectly and still have no idea what to do with accurate information.

This is where Australia’s approach has gone wrong. Media literacy has increasingly been treated as a standalone skill rather than one part of democratic capability. Yet democracy is not a fact-checking exercise. It is a judgement exercise. Media literacy teaches citizens how to evaluate information. Civic capability teaches them how institutions turn information into decisions and how citizens can influence those decisions. One without the other produces informed observers rather than effective participants.

That narrowing also explains why media literacy has become politically contested. A curriculum built around fact-checking alone can easily be portrayed as teaching deference to approved sources. A curriculum that teaches how power works—who decides, how decisions are made, what evidence matters and how those decisions can be challenged—equips people to think independently. That is a much stronger answer to accusations of indoctrination.

Things like, workshops delivered, participants trained and courses completed are simple outputs to report. Democratic judgement and civic capability develop slowly and resist easy measurement. What is easiest to count has gradually become what is easiest to fund.

The deeper problem is not that media literacy has been overvalued. It is that it has been under-scoped. Australia has asked one skill to carry the weight of an entire democratic capability system.

—>Design flaw 3: Capability and accountability have become separate policy agendas

The encouraging news is that Australia is beginning to strengthen both citizen capability and institutional accountability. The National Media Literacy Strategy aims to improve citizens’ ability to navigate information. The proposed Digital Duty of Care shifts responsibility towards the systems and processes that shape online experiences. Both reforms move in the right direction.

The problem is that they are being developed largely as separate policy agendas. Media literacy is treated as an education initiative. The Digital Duty of Care is treated as an online safety reform. Yet misinformation sits at the intersection of both. Democratic resilience depends on capable citizens operating within accountable information systems—not on one replacing the other.

The public appears to recognise this balance. Our survey of 1,273 multicultural Australians — The People’s Mandate, conducted in June — found only 3% supported greater restrictions on speech, while 66% wanted stronger institutional accountability. Australians are not asking governments to decide what people can say. They are asking why the institutions shaping the information environment carry comparatively few responsibilities.

Australia does not need to choose between citizen capability and institutional accountability. It needs to connect them.

Re-balancing responsibility

None of this is an argument against media literacy. It is an argument against expecting media literacy to do a job it was never designed to do. Capability should complement institutional accountability, not replace it. 3 fixes would re-balance the burden.

First, explicitly recognise misinformation and information disorder as systemic risks within the Digital Duty of Care.

The proposed framework already regulates systems rather than speech. That architecture should now be aligned with the National Media Literacy Strategy so that citizen capability and institutional accountability reinforce one another rather than developing in parallel.

Second, stop treating media literacy as a standalone product.

It should sit within a broader civic capability framework that teaches not only how to evaluate information, but also how democratic institutions work, how public decisions are made, and how citizens can influence them. Australia does not need to start from scratch. Communities have already built and tested this capability. Government should invest in strengthening and scaling what already exists, rather than funding disconnected workshops with no lasting pathway. Community-built models already demonstrate what an integrated civic capability approach could look like, including the Australian Civic excellence leadership program

Third, hold institutions accountable for what happens next.

When the Royal Commission reports, the institutions criticised in the evidence—governments, platforms, broadcasters and political leaders—should publicly explain what they accept, what they reject and what they will change. After years of consultation, communities are no longer asking whether government is listening. They are asking whether participation leads to action.

Not everything is a skills gap. Australians and multicultural Australians in particular, are not simply struggling to discern truth from falsehood. They are navigating institutions that have become less trusted, less responsive and, too often, less accountable.

A genuine national strategy would strengthen both sides of democratic resilience: capable citizens and accountable institutions. Until then, every new media literacy announcement should prompt the same question: what new responsibility has been placed on institutions—not just on citizens?

Tharini Rouwette

@alliesincolour

Tharini Rouwette examines democratic legitimacy, institutional trust and social cohesion. Founder of Allies in Colour and creator of The People’s Mandate—Australia’s independent civic voting initiative measuring public legitimacy.