The law, which was pushed through last year as part of a raft of amendments to the Electoral Act and supported by the Liberal Party, also requires media organisations to keep a person's real name and full address on file for six months, and they face fines of $5000 if they do not hand over this information to the Electoral Commissioner.
Seriously? Australia?
Read on for paranoia, political slime, and ultimate Internet victory!
It's every government's wet dream to put a leash on their critics. Some go as far as to parade them around as examples of "free" speech. China's been doing pretty well on that front recently. Apparently, South Australian democracy is just too fragile to tolerate any comment on the political process. After all, someone might hurt someone else's feelings, causing society to collapse, and leading to:
- Human sacrifice
- Dogs and cats living together.
- Mass hysteria!
Attorney-General Michael Atkinson denied that the new law was an attack on free speech.
"The AdelaideNow website is not just a sewer of criminal defamation, it is a sewer of identity theft and fraud," Mr Atkinson said.
"There is no impinging on freedom of speech, people are free to say what they wish as themselves, not as somebody else."
Sewer-dwelling AdelaideNow readers were not amused. After a firestorm of internet fury, Atkinson caved. In a “humiliating” concession, he reversed his position with practiced ease, calling on the political parties who had supported the law to “review” their positions. The law will be repealed retroactively after the election. But until then, express your thoughts without obediently reporting your vital statistics and you could end up in a kangaroo court.
On a somewhat (somewhat) related note, have you heard about the new censorship law passed in Australia? It effectively bans (among other things) small breasted women from appearing in pornography. The reason? Using small breasted women in pornography encourages pedophilia, since small breasted adult women look like underage women.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.sankakucomplex.com/2010/01/28/australia-bans-small-breasts-as-child-pornography/
Ugh. Of all the silly, silly things that have been done in the face of the ugliness of child abuse, this is really a winner.
ReplyDelete"Presumably small breasted women taking photographs of themselves will now be guilty of creating simulated child pornography, to say nothing of the message this sends to women with modestly sized chests or those who favour them.
Australia is also said to have banned pornographic depictions of female ejaculation, a normal orgasmic sexual response in many women, with censors branding it as “abhorrent"."
So not only are women who didn't win gargantuan porn star tits in the genetic lottery (or acquire them via a scalpel) now too dangerous to get naked on the internet, those who were gifted with particularly spectacular orgasms are now "abhorrent"?
There are all sorts of things wrong with this (promotion of an obnoxiously normative body image, paranoia, misogyny, futility), but it seems to be, most fundamentally, an expression of a completely negative attitude toward sex and sexuality. Surely, they (the Man?) seem to think, if we ignore it, deny it, and delegitimize it, it'll just go away, right? We have a duty to sanitize and neuter ourselves for the good of a harmonious, sterile, "safe" society, or risk the collapse of civilization.
But you can't push a basic human drive into the closet like that. It doesn't work that way. Just ask Ted Haggard.
"There are all sorts of things wrong with this (promotion of an obnoxiously normative body image, paranoia, misogyny, futility), but it seems to be, most fundamentally, an expression of a completely negative attitude toward sex and sexuality."
ReplyDeleteThank god we don't have that in America...
Oh, wait..