Matthew Gream writes
- sedition
I wrote:
Not a crime.
Is in Australia, probably in other countries as well. Naturally there are going to be problems with international aspects of crime in this respect, jurisdictions and so on, but those are only technicalities -- the crime can easily occur in a localised environment.
Witchcraft is also illegal in Australia. When was the last prosecution for sedition?
During the many decades I lived in Australia there was never a prosecution for sedition, and there was plenty of sedition.
Has the place turned totalitarian since I left?
Not really. No more so than other countries (like the U.S and Canada), and a lot less than other countries (like Singapore). On the negative side, the absence of a constitutional equivalent to the First amend- ment does mean that speech is slightly more limited here, but not much. One example is that the magazine "Who Weekly" was ordered to stop distributing one of it's issues, as it identified on the front cover (with photo attached) a person charged with murdering several backpackers. One other cloud on the horizon is that the Keating government may make race-hate speech illegal. I doubt it will be tabled in anything other than an emasculated format, and will be shredded to pieces in the Senate. It's still a dubious precedent. :-< However, there are a few positive aspects. The religious right are not as numerous, and do not have as much political power. Our most notable fundamentalist, Reverend Fred Nile, is in the legislative council of N.S.W., but he is widely regarded as a loonie. Homosexuality is legal in every state except Tasmania, and that will change soon :-) (although I do think that the tactic of appealing to the UN Human Rights Commision to achieve this is slightly shoddy.) We also permit hypodermic needle exchanges, and that keeps the AIDS rate down. In short, in some ways we are as liber[al/tarian] as the U.S., in other ways we aren't. Unfortunately, legislation is always reformed on a piece meal basic. This means that there is always a lot of miscellaneous obsolete legislation that no-one ever gets around to removing until something stupid happens as a result. For example, one Tarot card reader in Ipswich (a satellite city of Brisbane) did get charged with witchcraft by some undercover police. I think (and a lot of other people would agree here) that this was a waste of police resources that would be better served fighting real crime (i.e., murder, rape, theft, etc.). I just hope the case gets thrown out of court. Alas, this ain't cryptography.
-- --------------------------------------------------------------------- We have the right to defend ourselves and our | property, because of the kind of animals that we | James A. Donald are. True law derives from this right, not from | the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. | jamesd@netcom.com
======================================================= | Peter Murphy. <pkm@maths.uq.oz.au>. Department of | | Mathematics - University of Queensland, Australia. | ------------------------------------------------------- | "What will you do? What will you do? When a hundred | | thousand Morriseys come rushing over the hill?" | | - Mr. Floppy. | =======================================================