There is a sculpture in Prague memorialising victims of the communist years. It comprises a series of copies of a human figure with progressively more pieces missing, representing the progressive destruction of the individual.

Jane Goodall (the Australian writer, not the primatologist) reminded us after the death of Czech intellectual and former president Václav Havel in 2011 how he pointed to the deeper effects of the communist oppression of his people. Oppressed people become so used to living in a lie that it infiltrates every aspect of their lives, until they can’t deal honestly with each other, or even with themselves.

Havel understood that only if we are willing to speak the truth, in public, to each other and to ourselves, can we hope to keep or extract ourselves from the mire of oppression. Havel suffered imprisonment and risked his life to do so. Goodall further notes ‘Havel spoke always from a conviction that civic intelligence is the most valuable commodity in any nation, and its erosion is the greatest danger.’

Our present plight in Australia has long-term roots in commercial media that promote sensation, outrage and division for profit. Our political culture matches that in its adversarial conduct and superficial abuse and vilifying of each other.

The commercial media promote the world view of their rich, right-wing owners, by propagandising and by omission of unfavoured or uncomfortable news. The Murdoch media go further, and openly inject themselves into politics.

Australians have been found, in careful surveys, to be more tolerant, compassionate and peace-loving than the current culture of our sordid political class. The reason for this divergence is the saturation coverage given to right-wing views. What the response of Australians would have been to a calm, accurate campaign advising them of the issues involved with the Voice to Parliament we can only conjecture.

The referendum vote would surely have been more sympathetic if there had not been a highly organised campaign promoting furphies, absurd conspiracy theories, nutter claims about land grabs, distractions about so-called elites and vicious attacks on proponents of the Voice, with all that wealthy White propaganda being fronted by the Black faces of two sadly misguided or cynical indigenous people.

If we do not soon respond to this escalation of deceitful, negative campaigning we will find that thoughtful debate, compassion, and concern about the governance of Australia will no longer be possible.

I wrote recently that it is nearly impossible to discuss policing our public conversation because of a reflex mantra about freedom of the press. Even to suggest enforcing quite basic requirements of journalism, such as clearly separating reporting and commentary, and not propagating obvious falsehoods, provokes mock horror, wounded innocence, pontifications about Quality Press and dark mutterings about North Korea.

The notion of freedom of the press, inherited from another era, has long-since been twisted into freedom of the press barons. But the press barons are in league with the mainstream politicians, and most are intent on promoting their power and wealth at the expense of the open, liberal, democratic society we pretend we live in.

Human beings are highly social, contrary to the ramblings of the misconceived neoliberal ideology. Central to our social behaviour is our uniquely human capacity for language. We talk, we bond, we organise ourselves.

The media, print, broadcast and electronic, are the means by which we extend our conversations across large societies. It is a monumental folly to have allowed a few people to obtain a stranglehold on our social conversation and to shrink it and twist it to their own purposes.

The electronic media are difficult to manage, but the print and broadcast media are still major players, propagating and amplifying many of the lies and initiating quite a lot of them. We need to recognise the need to remove or limit their toxic influence on our society. We need to find a more functional balance between robust discussion and the clear communication at the heart of a healthy society.

At present there is very little being done, and no one place responsible for policing lies. The Australian Electoral Commission tried to counter a lot of false claims in the recent campaign, but it can only address the process, not the issues. Labor has a bill pending addressing electronic media, though that is being challenged as too restrictive. But Labor also approved an official pamphlet in which the No case contained known lies. Evidently we can’t rely on Labor to step up to the challenge, no surprise there.

Besides policing, there are reforms that would get closer to the source of the problem, and that might even be easier. We could create and support outlets owned and managed by their audience. There is precedent, Positive News has done it voluntarily.

The media moguls have the enormous privilege of operating within the beating heart of our society, and they systematically abuse that privilege and hold us hostage. We owe them nothing. We could nationalise the existing commercial media and then pass ownership and management to their audiences. No, that is not how North Korea works, though it may be a shocking proposal to many. A large, democratic body of owners would tend to moderate the extremes. It would not be perfect, nothing ever is, but it would be a big improvement on the present plutocratic anarchy.

Bronwyn Kelly advocates an independent internet platform on which we all could jointly create a description of the kind of society we would like to be, part of the enhancement of democracy she advocates, so it could actually be representative instead of being a short-term, repeatable dictatorship in which governments routinely act against the known wishes of their electors. Such a forum would be very healthy, and the challenge would be to keep it open, constructive and independent.

We need to stop being precious about ‘freedom’ of the media and take on the challenging job of managing them so they are of net benefit. The alternative is a dysfunctional society and a state governed by dark money.

If you doubt the potential malevolence of governments, consider the robodebt scheme prosecuted by the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments. The Monthly subheaded an article about robodebt ‘How a criminal government turned on its people’. In the article, journalist Rick Morton refers to a succession of characters in the government ‘who seemed to openly despise whole swathes of the nation’. He wrote ‘Few among the coalition’s ranks could hate as industriously as Scott Morrison’.

Fascism of the kind practiced by Benito Mussolini, is a union of government and big business. The influence of wealthy special interests in Australia is already pervasive, but that influence reaches a new level in draconian anti-protest laws passed by compliant politicians to maintain industries that destroy our liveable climate.

Those are the clear beginnings of fascism. With surveillance already pervasive our governments, unchecked, will become increasingly totalitarian.