Some more on ISP filtering, and a rant on censorship in Australia

The Greens (who I am considering joining, despite their unreasonable opposition to nuclear power) have said they will oppose the "clean feed" proposal in the Senate, so unless the Coalition decides it is a good idea after all, or put it to a conscience vote (because let's face it, a number of conservatives think censorship is a legitimate form of governance), it's dead. This is a Very Good Thing.

But it raises some more general issues: why is Australia so damned intent upon censoring anything? Why do we have among the most draconian censorship laws in the democratic world? Isn't it about time that we abandoned the idea that an unrepresentative board, comprising people who the government happens to like, get to tell adults what they can and cannot see or experience if it is legal? Porn, no matter how explicit, is not implicated in any general moral decline so far as we know, and in fact the opposite seems to be true. Rating things and restricting access to minors, fine. Great idea. But censorship is not.

Once we start getting into censorship we lose our rights to self-direction of our lives. We impede access to researchers to understand our society. We give powers to people, mostly law enforcement, to discriminate between what is good and bad, and as it happens they always, without fail, abuse the powers they are given. Because they are humans.

If the Parliament declares something illegal, then it can be enforced (if the law makes sense and actually is enforceable). But if it is not illegal, it ought not be controlled for adults. This applies to abortion, recreational drugs (the rates of addition to so-called "controlled" drugs are pretty much the same as they were before the substances were prohibited or controlled, and so all that has happened is a sheltered workshop for law enforcement bureaucrats) and what we choose to see and read.

it is time that we abandoned this stupid patronising principle that someone can tell you, a responsible adult, what to do because they, or more properly the special interests that have the ear of the bureaucrats and governments of the day (mainly churches) think they know better. This is a democracy of responsible persons, and we ought to be treated as such. Merely because Rudd happens to think that the churches should have exceptional control over the "social fabric" (one day I'm going to rant about metaphors used for controlling us), doesn't make it right. He knows it, and he ought to have the moral fibre to support the secularisation of Australia.

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I think that this sort of thing highlights the advantages of a written constitution.

As I understand it, under the British system, Parliament is held to be supreme and only it has the power to make and unmake laws. On the surface that sounds fine, a representative democracy in which the will of the people is expressed through the legislature. The downside of this is that legislatures can - and do - make silly and even bad law. And laws once made, like liberties ceded, are extremely difficult to undo.

If we assume that there are certain fundamental rights to which all humans should be entitled within society then it makes sense to embody them in a written constitution that is isolated, to some extent, from popular whim and political fashion. If freedom of belief and expression are agreed to be essential to a healthy democracy then they should be given concrete form in a statutory declaration that cannot be violated except under the most extreme of circumstances. An assumed or implied right is far harder to defend than one that is stated in law to be inviolable even by those who happen to be in a majority at a particular time.

By Ian H Spedding FCD (not verified) on 27 Nov 2008 #permalink

Parliament is the sovereign power under the Westminster system, but they are balanced by the judiciary, who can declare laws unconstitutional, or in contradiction to common law. We have a written constitution, by the way, what we lack is a bill of rights. But I do not think that a written bill of rights is any better a protection against abuse in the face of compliant legislators and judiciary than common law...

"unreasonable opposition to nuclear power"

What do you do with the rubbish after it's been created? If you've got a reasonable answer to that, I'll accept that opposition to nuclear power is unreasonable. So far, all solutions are different shades of stupid.

After more than 50 years, nobody has got a good answer, because the fact is that nuclear power produces highly poisonous waste that remains highly poisonous for thousands of years.

By hinschelwood (not verified) on 27 Nov 2008 #permalink

Put it back in the mine from where you got it. If it was poisonous before when there, it can be poisonous there again.

Of course a much better solution is to use one tenth of the energy we now use, but there's only one way that's going to happen, and as a parent I don't want it.

And as an encore, you will pour a quart into a pint pot without spillage. And of course, it is actually more poisonous after going through a reactor than it was before. So that's one idea that doesn't work.

By hinschelwood (not verified) on 27 Nov 2008 #permalink

This is not the thread for this debate - I may start one later. But one can put the nuclear waste into vitrified substrates. Sure, it's dangerous and potentially poisonous in the future, but what are the alternatives? No other energy source apart from fossil fuels will meet our needs even in the medium term. So either we have to change our industry and civilisation, which is a hundred or more year process, and the crisis will come sooner than that, or we have a major collapse. I do not favour that alternative.

Incidentally, as you are (I gather from your website) in the UK, should you really be using that computer? Some of the energy you are relying on now comes from nuclear power stations, and the rest from coal, nicht wahr? IOW, it's easy to be principled if you don't consider your own actions. Nuclear power could, I think, be the greenest power source available. It isn't perfect, but nothing will ever be. The major downside in practice, though, would be heat waste, not radiation, if it is properly supervised. And the extra cost will make people value the energy they use more.

Does Australia have any law similar to Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms? If it does, could this attempt to strangle internet communication survive what we Canucks call a "Charter Challenge"?

By Elliott Grasett (not verified) on 27 Nov 2008 #permalink

Fair enough, I actually wondered why it found its way into the original article in the first place.

Incidentally, I'm in Germany, although originally from the UK. *My* electricity is guaranteed renewable (hydro, wind, etc). That's what my supplier says, at least, and I chose the supplier specifically for this reason. I do at least attempt to practice what I preach - as far as I can practically.

Also, I'm a physicist, so I actually *like* nuclear power, in principle at least. It genuinely is only the disposal problem that I can't square.

By hinschelwood (not verified) on 27 Nov 2008 #permalink

Elliott, no, we don't. All our rights are covered by actual legislation (which can of course be changed with new legislation) or are "traditional" (which means it can be modified by injudicious judicial decisions). Mostly, though, the judiciary does OK, particularly at the High Court.

Hinschelwood: Because it's my blog and I gets to make intemperate comments when I feels like it. Which is most of the time...

About the nuclear waste. They are currently running trials all over the world to see if they can't speed up the decay by turning long lived isotopes into shorter ones.
That still won't remove the need for long term store since short will still mean something between minutes and a hundred years or so. But it would make turn the duration of storage from forever to 'merely' a few hundred or thousand years and possible make waste interesting again to use for energy generation (Japanese did trials on this) and

By Who Cares (not verified) on 27 Nov 2008 #permalink

I'm in agreement with you. It is incredibly demeaning to be told that I'm not responsible enough to make my own decisions. The lack of an R18 rating for computer games is another point of contention that has been getting up my nose.

As for nuclear power, my major problem isn't the waste, it's that there isn't all that much uranium available at the rate we'd be using it. Investing tones of money into nuclear power, only to see the raw materials dry up in 50-100 years seems pretty pointless when we could invest in renewables now.

It is quite important not to confuse known reserves with available resources, at some point known reserves are sufficient that it ceases to be worthwhile looking for more. The known oil reserve stayed at thirty years for decades for this reason, once you have enough known for the next thirty years you stop looking. If known supplies of Uranium start to become an actual constraint it will be worth looking for more, you can also use Thorium.

By Brett Dunbar (not verified) on 28 Nov 2008 #permalink

It's arguable that Canada's situation is no better than Australia's when one considers that the Charter is vitiated by its "Notwithstanding" clause.

BTW, "Merely because Rudd happens to think that the churches should have exceptional control over the "social fabric" (one day I'm going to rant about metaphors used for controlling us), doesn't make it right."

Does this Rudd person confuse social fabric with red tape?

By Elliott Grasett (not verified) on 28 Nov 2008 #permalink

John S Wilkins wrote:

But I do not think that a written bill of rights is any better a protection against abuse in the face of compliant legislators and judiciary than common law...

I acknowledge the merits of common law and agree that there is no such thing as an ironclad guarantee but I still believe that a bill asserting basic human rights, easily accessible to all by being enumerated in one place, is more useful than the same guarantees buried away in dense thickets of legal precedent.

If I were an American citizen - which I hope to become - I could cite the First Amendment to the Constitution as the legal foundation of my right to freedom of speech. As a subject of Her Majesty, I am now able to cite Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights as incorporated into British law by The Human Rights Act 1998 as a similar basis. Prior to that, though, I have no idea what previous decisions in British common law, if any, asserted a general right to freedom of expression. Excluding lawyers, would anyone here have known for either British or Australian law?

People are generally apathetic about their rights unless they perceive a direct threat to them. Obviously they are able to respond more confidently and forcefully to a possible denial if they know the right exists in law rather than just believing it ought to be there somewhere.

Another advantage is that it compels anyone seeking to abridge those rights to justify their proposal. A presumptive right can be brushed aside much more easily than a statutory one.

By Ian H Spedding FCD (not verified) on 29 Nov 2008 #permalink

Actually, the High Court has interpreted the Australian constitution as giving a limited right to free speech. Or, more correctly, it has interpreted the constitution as containing an implied limit on the legislative power of the federal and state parliaments to pass laws restricting speech. The trouble is that this limit relates only to political speech (which is a very fuzzy category). It's unlikely that the "clean feed", etc., legislation will be drafted so poorly as to fall afoul of that limited constitutional protection ... though the constitutional protection might be some safeguard against future abuses.

I certainly wouldn't count on that, though, and I strongly oppose what Rudd and Conroy want to do.

Generally speaking, I favour a bill of rights for Australia, but there's always a question of what it will end up saying. I can imagine many interests on both the Right and Left wanting to qualify/water down the protection of free speech to the extent that it would probably end up being useless or even counterproductive. The Canadian experience doesn't entirely cheer me. That doesn't mean I oppose the idea - as I said, I favour it, but with a lot of misgivings.