(Image: Mitchell Squire/Private Media)

Scott Morrison’s Chinese-style online identification laws are intended to further tilt the balance of information and online control in favour of the powerful against the powerless.

They’re derived from China’s successful attempt to prevent the existence of online anonymity, but in this case not by mandating it directly but by subjecting social media platforms to the threat of defamation payouts if they fail to help out “trolls” — a catch-all term designed to incorporate anyone who offends someone sufficiently wealthy to launch an action for defamation.

As Australia’s media history shows, that includes some noxious, and very influential, figures who abused our litigant-friendly defamation laws to attack journalists and victims for exposing them. Now social media platforms will be turned into de facto enforcement arms of powerful people determined to exploit a rotten defamation system, as if the latter needed any more help in trying to pursue their critics.

Online anonymity is richly and constantly abused, yes. Women are particular targets — especially women who dare to publicly articulate any kind of opinion, such as female politicians and journalists. People of colour and LGBTIQ people also come in for far more abuse and receive far more threats than white men.

But removing online anonymity, as has been shown time and again, is a poor solution: people are nearly as abusive under their real names as anonymously, while anonymity is crucial to allowing the powerless and those without a public platform to challenge the powerful and privileged, who in analog times were able to use the court system to block criticism and inconvenient reporting.

But the powerful don’t merely use the court system and defamation laws, they use anonymity as well. Anonymity is embedded in the way politics is reported. Journalists provide the most powerful people in the country with anonymity so that they can discuss their colleagues, and the performance of the government, honestly (or at least while purporting to be honest) — exactly the rationale of anonymous critics of the powerful who are targeted by Morrison’s proposal. Political staffers are afforded a high level of anonymity despite wielding considerable power and controlling the allocation of public funding — even when they have misused public resources or breached confidentiality.

In fact government ministers and staffers routinely anonymously leak, including national security information, to serve their personal and partisan interests. Scott Morrison’s office frequently backgrounds journalists against those deemed enemies — whether Gladys Berejiklian or Brittany Higgins’ partner — under the cover of anonymity. Such leaks are rarely investigated and never prosecuted. However, the entire state security apparatus is brought to bear to de-anonymise officials who leak information deemed politically embarrassing: phone metadata is obtained, journalists’ homes are raided, whistleblowers prosecuted.

Individual politicians are not averse to using online anonymity either. Angus Taylor has created fake accounts to shower himself with praise. Andrew Laming was revealed to operate dozens of Facebook accounts. Right-wing Queenslander Amanda Stoker has used pseudonymous accounts to defend herself. Government MPs also host anonymous disinformation on their sites.

And then there’s Christian Porter’s readiness to rely on anonymous funding to pay his legal bills for his unsuccessful legal action against the ABC. And the Liberal and National Parties’ refusal to reveal donations below the legal disclosure threshold. And their refusal to establish a system of ministerial meeting diaries like those in place in NSW and Queensland.

That is, anonymity is for the government to use in its own interests, and must not be permitted to anyone else — in particular, it must be crushed for anyone using it to criticise or embarrass the government.

If the government were consistent, there might be something to be said for ending anonymity. Whoever it was at the top of Home Affairs or in Peter Dutton’s office who leaked an ASIO report would be in jail. The PMO staffer who briefed against David Sharaz would be publicly named and shamed. Frontbenchers happy to undermine colleagues would have to shut up. Security agency heads who selectively brief favourable stories to pet journalists would be sacked. Christian Porter would have to reveal his donors. We’d know who was swanning around the corridors of the ministerial wing influencing ministers.

But that would lead to more accountability, when Morrison’s goal is always less.