Craig Kelly - his prominence, his massive audience and his access to power - is the consequence of a decade of allowing lies to bloom both on social and traditional media.

He is not new: the consequences of years of complacency are simply newly visible to you.

Tolerance of lies - and a lack of effort to curate information, to counter deception and to consider the consequences of platforming known deceivers - builds up and up. It's like greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It's slow, but the consequences hit fast.

Craig Kelly - and a range of other politicians - have been given free, unfettered reign to spread lies on major media outlets for many years Doesn't matter whether they get hard questions or easy questions.

It's a slow release of misinformation. It builds up - it accumulates.

Do you know why people keep saying Kelly's only been doing this for "months"?

It's because they can't draw the line between coaxing climate denial, misinformation and lies for years, and what is happening now. https://twitter.com/CroweDM/status/1356768906837299203

What this should precipitate is two things:

- Recognition of a looming crisis in Australia that manifests much like it did in America; where trusted institutions decay and people get hurt because lies become dominant

- A change in attitude towards allowing misinformation

But that would mean considering things that would be dismissed as too radical - like understanding that, for instance, Australia's Energy Minister is spreading misinformation just as harmful as Craig Kelly - probably with far greater public health impacts, Id' argue.

Craig Kelly seems to sort of be serving as a kind of sacrificial symbol here.

By treating the problem as if it's concentrated in a single person instead of spread deep throughout both social and traditional media in Australia, systemic questions can be avoided.