This is probably the most significant issue for Australian democracy since the amendments to the ASIO Act by the Howard government: link.
More on it later. If you already know about it, get a move on and write to your state’s senators.
Archive for the 'free speech' Category
no clean feed
30Oct08on-line defamation decision, eh
29Oct08A Canadian court has recently handed down what seems like an eminently sensible judgment concerning defamation on the Internet: story/judgment. In essence, the decision means that (for Canadian purposes) linking to a defamatory web page does not itself amount to defamation. The Supreme Court of British Columbia drew an analogy between hyperlinks and footnotes, which […]
there’s probably no god
22Oct08This is fantastic: ads on London buses advocating atheism.
I wonder how hard this would be to fund in Australia, and whether it would somehow offend our anti-discrimination/hate speech laws, which (like our constitution, according to the High Court) seem to protect every belief system except atheism.
an idea about police spying
17Oct08This kind of thing makes grim but not at all surprising reading. Just as they did in the 1950s and 1960s, the powers that be are making it their business to infiltrate groups of citizens attempting to exercise their legitimate democratic rights. Not surprisingly, the targets seem to be progressive and human rights […]
spin of the week
19Jul07The Australian runs a ridiculous front page story which describes a poll showing an electoral disaster for the Government as “HOWARD CHECKS RUDD’S MARCH!!!!1!!!11!!” (NB: there may have been fewer ‘!!1!’s).
Independent (and very excellent) political analysis site criticises blatant pro-Government bias in The Australian.
The Australian contacts the author and advises that the newspaper is going […]
an enemy of the open society
01Jul07This article from The Australian, entitled “Silencing Our Basic Freedom”, is compulsory reading for anyone who cares about the future of democracy in Australia. This blog is frequently critical of that particular newspaper, but on this issue it is fighting for an extremely important and non-partisan cause - the ability of the media, and […]
Seemingly out of the blue, Australia’s main media outlets have actually agreed on something other than money and their desire for more money, and have got together to launch a campaign called “Australia’s Right to Know.” The focus of the campaign is the decrease in media freedom in Australia, and the perceived lack of […]
As a result of the infinite joys of spam, the comment system is unfortunately going to require a name and email address - which will naturally not be used for anything other than comment moderation, published, disclosed to any third party, and so on and so on. In addition the first comment for a given […]
This comic says something pretty succinctly that I have been thinking a lot lately. It’s by the excellent American cartoonist Ted Rall, who is simultaneously black, bitter, perceptive and extremely funny (warning: and at times, rather left-wing, although not averse to attacking the mainstream left nearly as viciously as the right).
Well, George Lewis told […]
There is an interesting post on Samizdata (a UK blog best described as libertarian or individualist in philosophy) about the complicity of Western companies such as Google in the crimes of totalitarian regimes, and particularly China :
…one of the bees in our bonnet is collaboration of Western corporations with totalitarian and authoritarian regimes anywhere, in […]
I came across this handy list of the top 10 civil liberties violations of 2006 in Australia.
Near the top of my personal list would have to be #9, Freedom of Information and the effect of the High Court’s determination that a ‘conclusive’ Ministerial certificate is sufficient to prevent access to information. The effect of this […]
world’s #1 terrorist won’t fly
23Jan07This guy was prevented from flying to London because he was wearing a t-shirt featuring the words “World’s #1 Terrorist” and a picture of George W Bush. Our good friends at Qantas refused to let him fly on the basis that:
Whether made verbally or on a T-shirt, comments with the potential to offend other customers […]
