Who Cares About Free Speech?

It seems that everybody is allowed to write a book about themselves, unless our fine government dislikes them or their message. To quote from the Overland Blog, "On 20 July 2011, the Australian government served David Hicks with a notice of their intent to restrain any funds obtained from the sale of his book, Guantanamo: My Journey, under the Commonwealth Proceeds of Crime Act."

The Overland team have written more about this and have begun a Petition in Support of David Hicks which I have signed. I urge other people who believe in freedom of speech to sign it too—regardless of your feelings about David Hicks the man.

The End of Civilisation

Life, some awful lurgy, and a couple of family crises got in the way of my plan to write stuff every day this week. But eventually most of that settled down and now I can look back at the week.

For the past few years, my wife has worked on Monday mornings at Southport on about a three-weekly schedule. I drive her down, then go for a walk for an hour or so along the seafront before finding a cafe in the shade where I read. That walk from the Sheraton Mirage towards Surfers has always pleased me. It has a nice wide path, there is plenty of shade from trees, the sea is just there with its endless music, and a nice cooling breeze makes for comfortable walking.

When she finishes her work, I collect her, and sometimes we find a restaurant for lunch or drive back to Brisbane and go out for lunch there. Overall, it works out nicely for us both.

But the last few times I've been for my walk, I've noticed disturbing signs that things are not as peaceful and pleasant as my picture would have it. There are increasing numbers of nasty racist slogans painted on various structures along the path. "Destroy Evil Islam," "Gooks Out", "Muslims Out" are probably the most popular.

The council does regular maintenance of the path, collecting litter (which is a big job), mowing the grass, and so on. But they appear to have no interest in the signs.

I find myself less and less able to enjoy my walk in this normally peaceful place when it is the new place for this hate speech. It makes me sick. It must make the targets pretty upset too.

Why I will vote for the Greens

I've voted Labor all my life, not because I like their colours or the dress sense of their leaders, but because their policies have been generally in accord with my own principles. I've never voted for the two big conservative parties because their policies have been (and remain) focussed towards meeting goals that I believe to be unethical.

And, until now, I have never voted for a minor party—mostly because their policies are either single-issue or unethical (or both). However, the continuing drift of Labor to the right and the abandonment of policies that are of fundamental importance (the environment; the treatment of women, minorities and refugees; the education and health systems, to name several) has made me look harder at the alternatives.

In the past, I was not impressed by the narrow focus of the Greens or by their lack of real policies beyond their principal focus. And I have been unimpressed by some of their preferences decisions. But they have come of age at a time when the major parties have descended into irrelevance. The Greens now have real and ethical policies on most of what I see as the important issues of 2010.

Obviously, the election on 21 August will return us a government controlled by one of the two major parties. But now seems like the right time to tell them something about how people really feel. So, if you think the Greens are right about at least some of the important issues, do what I'm going to do—put them first in both houses of parliament and then give your second preference to the major party of your choice. If you're lucky enough to find the Greens' preference allocation meets your needs, then vote above the line. Otherwise, do what I do and take the time to number every box below the line. It's not hard and we only get to do it once every three years. Seems like a small price to pay to put pressure on whoever is the government to start doing the right thing.

Filter Stubs Toe Again

This is all over the news and the blogz, so I won't clutter the place up with URLs. The Conroy train to idiocy has been declared late due to some purported efforts to get it right, which appears to mean delaying it until after the election at least.

That counts as good news, although it's only a tiny step. Perhaps they will quietly abandon it after the election. Somehow, I don't think that will happen. So I suppose I'll have to start thinking about the cleanest way to opt out, as there seems little likelihood that Conroy will do a u-turn and switch it to opt-in.

When you consider that none of the bad guys will have to think about this—since all but the utterly insane ones would have opted out of showing their illegal habits to the government years ago—it's a bit annoying that the good guys now have to bestir themselves in order to opt out of the filter. At least there's no real rush and this can just go on my long todo list.

Part of the problem for me is that my spouse is a psychotherapist who has to deal with victims of child abuse and, less often, with the abusers. She has good reason to look for materials that, while in no way exploitative or deserving of special classification, could easily trigger imperfect software that was supposed to be "protecting" us all from the evil ones.

Politicians and Pimps

Most politicians give me the same icky feeling that I get from the pimps in red light areas and they seem to come from the same part of the intellectual spectrum as well. A local candidate has letterboxed me asking me to tick the four issues that most concern me from a list which has no mention of the environment or detention centres or refugees.

The old graffiti on a wall near my childhood home that exhorted people with the slogan Don't vote—it only encourages them seems more and more apposite as the years go by.

To link my little political rant to the ostensible topic of this blog, it would also be nice to see politicians get a clue about the evils of things like software patents, internet censorship via technical means, copyright and so on.

Rant over. Here's hoping they get the election done promptly.