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It's a few things. Both the communications minister and the PM are, despite being in the Labor Party, actually quite religious and conservative. There is a very
by tjmc 17y ago
It's a few things. Both the communications minister and the PM are, despite being in the Labor Party, actually quite religious and conservative. There is a very strong wowser attitude from this government in particular which has resulted in increasing taxes on alcohol to discourage young drinking and various other forms of "nanny state" initiatives. We need to be protected from ourselves it seems.
Also, there is a single Australian senator (Steven Fielding) from a religious right party called Family First who holds the balance of power. His support is often required for the passage of government legislation, and the strong suspicion is that deals on things like internet censorship have been done behind the scenes.
Finally and most critically in my view, we have no enshrined right to freedom of speech or expression in our constitution and most Australians are too apathetic to demands these rights, and protest the government's actions.
- chaosmachine 17y ago"Also, there is a single senator ... who holds the balance of power." This seems to be a serious design flaw in democracy. One person (or one small party), with the ability to swing the majority vote one way or another, ends up with a disproportionate amount of power. We see this with the Quebec separatists in Canada, and in the US, with their "independent" senators.
- tjmc 17y agoIt gets worse. Australia has a preferential voting system where you rank the candidates from first choice to last. It's not too bad a system if there's a small number of candidates, but the senate has dozens. So the alternative to numbering every box (and what most people do for the senate), is to just put a "1" in the party of your choice. They then decide who the preferences go to. I'm not kidding. In the case of Steven Fielding, the 2 major parties both gave him their "preferences" above each other, but neither of the major parties got enough votes to get the seat, so he got it. How many people actually voted for him as their preferred candidate? 56,376
- miked 17y agoBoth the communications minister and the PM are, despite being in the Labor Party, actually quite religious and conservative. Translation: "no True Social Democrat would ever be in favor of censorship." This is a classic example of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman In the US, campus speech codes against "hate speech" are often worse than this, and campuses overwhelmingly conform to left-leaning views. http://www.thefire.org/index.php http://www.thefire.org/index.php