Since Monday, you may have been receiving Facebook ads from the Liberal party's official account, stating: "Labor's car tax would mean higher prices on some of Australia's most popular cars".

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As plenty of people have pointed out, this is simply not true: Labor's electric vehicle policy does not include any mention of a car tax.

In fact, the only tax-related measure is a tax break for businesses which buy electric vehicles worth more than $20,000, while the uptake of electric vehicles is expected to actually cost the budget more than $1bn a year by 2030 in lost fuel excise.

If the advertised claim is false, is this illegal? We know parties engage in political spin, but are there laws stopping them outright lying to the electorate?

The short answer is no, there aren't any.

Parties from both sides have taken advantage of this over the years to run misleading scare campaigns before elections - arguably corroding trust in democratic politics.

Now, in an age of post-truth politics, where debate is shaped by emotion and sometimes even conspiracy theory, there are renewed calls for regulation.

"I think we probably have reached a point in this Trump age where it really is worth seriously thinking about," Professor Graeme Orr, a University of Queensland expert on electoral law, told Hack.

"Social media companies are now calling out - Facebook is saying it wants governments around the world to share the job of defining and regulating disinformation."

"So if anything it's been given extra impetus."

Liberals, One Nation attack electric vehicles

For the 2016 federal election, Labor spent much of the campaign warning that the Liberals were planning to privatise Medicare, when in fact the Coalition was simply considering ways of updating the Medicare payment system, with one option being outsourcing.

This election, Labor has accused the Liberals of running a scare campaign over the Labor plan for half of all new cars to be electric by 2030.

On Sunday, the Prime Minister told media Labor's policy will bring an end to the "Australian weekend", claiming that electric vehicles don't have enough "grunt and power" - presumably to tow boats and caravans and enjoy the great Aussie outdoors.

The 'car tax' Facebook ads are the latest development. The ads were pitched at big car lovers; targeting Facebook users who liked Toyota Hiluxes, Holdens and other utility vehicles.

To satisfy political advertising rules, the ads had to include authorisations on the 'about' section of the posting page. The Australian Electoral Commission told Hack the ads met this standard.

The Liberals were in fact following One Nation's lead. A week earlier, on Tuesday, Pauline Hanson's party's official page posted that "Bill Shorten has announced he wants to get rid of half the cars in Australia and replace them with ones powered by batteries".

This is wrong: the policies proposed by Labor are targets for new vehicle sales.

Poll shows public support for 'truth in advertising' laws

This is a question that seems to come up every election, usually posed by the party that's been on the receiving end of a scare campaign.

After the 2016 election, Federal Liberal Party director Tony Nutt claimed the "Mediscare" campaign was based on cold-blooded lies that misled vulnerable members of the community.

Nick Xenophon also complained about Labor tactics - the crossbencher secured three Senate spots, but his overall vote was down from 2013. He believed a "misleading and deceitful" Labor scare campaign on reducing penalty rates was part of the reason.

"It was a lie," Mr Xenophon told Fairfax at the time.

I had to put up corrective advertising, but nowhere near to the extent of their misleading advertising. Why should politicians be exempt from the sort of laws that apply to misleading and deceptive advertising that apply to corporations and individuals?

A national ReachTEL poll conducted after the election found a huge majority of Australians wanted tougher truth in political advertising laws: 87.7 per cent of people said they wanted the change (including 94 per cent of Coalition voters).

The Australia Institute called for an enquiry into implementing truth in political advertising laws.

"In the past there was an industry self-regulating system for truth in TV political advertising, but since then it has effectively been a free-for-all," Executive Director of The Australia Institute, Ben Oquist said in a statement at the time.

Obviously political campaigning needs to be strong and robust, but it is time to have a fresh look at the system.

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Whatsapp Sam Dastyari laughs as Bill Shorten prepares to board the campaign bus following a Medicare rally in Sydney in 2016.

Up until the early noughties, the federation of commercial TV stations, or FACTS, heard complaints against misleading political advertising. They no longer do this, and just vet ads to ensure they are properly authorised and not defamatory.

In the meantime, the problem of fake news has grown worse.

In mid-2016, around the time this poll was being conducted, the UK was heading towards a referendum on whether to leave the European Union: the Brexiteers ran a vast ad campaign saying that leaving the EU would free up GBP 350 million a week for the UK health system.

The UK voted to leave, and only days later one of the main 'Leave' advocates, Nigel Farage, admitted the slogan "was a mistake".

According to the independent fact-checking website PolitiFact, during the 2016 US election campaign, 25 per cent of Hillary Clinton's claims were mostly false, false or "pants on fire false". By comparison, 70 per cent of Donald Trump's claims were false.

More than two years later, and with another Commonwealth election almost upon us, there are no national truth in political advertising laws.

Professor Orr, who proposed such laws in a 2016 piece in The Conversation, said he had a "gut feeling" when he saw the electric vehicle Facebook ads.

"People say what's the point when in so much of politics it's hard to trace who's saying what, but an ad where you're spending what must be significant amounts of money distributing it - this is something that can be policed," he said.

We can at least try and minimise misinformation or have laws where we see things that are quite blatant.

Last month, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg called for more government regulation of the internet including the areas of "information campaigns" and "election integrity".

"There are also important questions about how political campaigns use data and targeting," he said.

Why are there no laws for truth in political advertising?

In 1998, the Howard Government stood against truth in political advertising laws, arguing free speech was the best way to flush out false speech:

"The government firmly believes that political advertising should be truthful in its content. However, any legislation introduced to enforce this principle would be difficult to enforce ... voters, using whatever assistance they see fit from the media and other sources, remain the most appropriate arbiters of the worth of political claims."

And they may have been right. In January this year, a study found most Australians were willing to stand corrected when presented with facts, while Americans were more partisan, stubbornly backing their candidate, whether it was Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders.

Aside from this, there may also be constitutional problems with legislating: the High Court has established the Australian Constitution contains an implied freedom of political discussion, and this may strike out any laws limiting this freedom.

Then there are problems over who should arbitrate: neither electoral commissions nor judges like to get involved in partisan politics.

Parliament introduced national truth in political advertising laws in 1983 but quickly repealed them after finding them unworkable.

A 1984 parliamentary committee concluded that political advertising involved "intangibles, ideas, policies and images" which cannot be subjected to a test of truth.

At the state level, South Australia has introduced truth in political advertising laws with fines of up to $25,000 for parties. They're fairly narrow: they only cover statements that purport to be factual, that have been made during election campaigns, and which were meant to deceive.

Professor Orr told Hack national laws similar to those in South Australia would probably be enough to take down the Liberal party's misleading Facebook ad.