Australia Newspapers Redact Front Pages in Media-Freedom Protest
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The other blatant hypocrisy is Labor jumping on the #righttoknow bandwagon. They waved through the draconian TOLA act, warrantless metadata retention, voting for them and all the other over-reaching, flawed legislation despite huge campaigns by experts and the public, when they had almost the numbers to block it in the Senate.
The big news organisations here in Australia have grown to despise the very beast they helped created.
These comments have been in regards to Twitter, Discord, Google, Facebook and so on all trying to define fake news or ban people with certain political affiliations. The saddest thing is that mainstream media pushes unverified sources on the race to being first. Nobody punishes them for being incompetent. If theres eyeballs for ads who cares?
There is a reason in America we have a constitution and a bill of rights. It could very well be argued our bill of rights was written in blood. The blood of those who fought against totalitarian type of governments who forbade: freedom of speech and religious beliefs, freedom to protect oneself and their families against bad people and rogue governments. Those two foundational things shouldnt be compromised under the guise of a safer country. It will not end well. History says so.
Sadly there are some in America who are quickly forgetting these things and are foolishly ready to give the kings to the kingdom away.
Without free speech we will perish and follow in the steps of bad forms of government. Without the right to defend ourselves legally, we give the government all power over us. Just ask Russia and Venezuela how those democratic elections are going for them.
My current analogy is:
Censorship is the opium of the government.
Pain feels bad, but is good because it tells you when something bad has happened. Investigative journalism revealing wrongdoing is a type of pain. Censorship makes the pain go away without solving the real problems.
If you’re doing the political equivalent of surgery, you need the painkiller, but it is highly addictive — if you don’t stop using it as soon as possible, you’ll find you can’t stop, and you’ll use it to your own detriment. If your political situation needs a lot of ”surgery” you should ask yourself serious questions about that happened.
What’s the term for when a small amount of something that hurts is actually good for you? Hormesis?
Imagine what would have happened to the gay rights movement if it was trying to get off the ground in today's world? If people's locations were tracked, speech was censored, privacy denied?
And encryption, same deal. Consider the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Bill 2018 (the one that makes it illegal to have secure end-to-end encryption in Australia) [0].
The Labor party managed to work in with the government's tight timeframe and get the bill passed in a single day on the 6th of December [1] after a very short timeframe for consultation and gathering opinions. Labour did note that when introduced a two and a half months before that they didn't like the bill, but frankly it is obvious that they were working with the government to rush it through without scrutiny. No serious debate as far as I'm aware.
The bipartisanship on these issues is frankly miserable. Labour is in no position to claim that they support free and open communication. I honestly havn't figured out why these issues get such unanimous support by the political class. I do wish that Australian's would take it more seriously, our laws surrounding free speech and civil liberties are in a really bad state.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-law-global-...
[1] https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislat... - see Progress heading
I think its because too few Australians care enough for this to matter to politicians and the parties, who respond to incentives like everyone else.
This doesn't absolve pollies of responsibility for passing these draconian measures, but it is an important fact to acknowledge if we want to successfully change the culture around security issues in Australia.
It isn't obvious to me why they think the incentives align for making Australians less secure. If nobody cares, why not write laws that protect everyone including politicians?
The Liberals literally called the Federal Police down on the AWU and notified the press before the raid. For those who aren't Australian the AWU is a union that is basically part of the Labor party organising body. Are federal politicians really so stupid as to think this stuff isn't going to be used against them at some point? Police enforcement actions are clearly entering the world of the political federally and probably in Victoria. There is a lot of talk about ICAC. China is breathing down our necks to gain more access to our computer networks, our University networks were hacked just the other week. This is not hypothetical stuff for our politicians; these are all actions targeting people like them.
I can all but guarantee that there is a technician at any Australian digital-communication company who can be bribed by a foreign actor to hand over all communication a given politician has made on that service.
Yes. They are. "Stupid" is often a straight-talking way to say they are "lacking sufficient wisdom to fully understand the implications."
Some people really do need to learn by getting burnt. Others need multiple burns before they think it is serious. There are people who need to be on fire before they will agree that being burnt is a possibility.
These are fundamental liberties for a functioning democracy and they are finally facing some pushback in the general media. IMO this should be embraced and supported by anyone who's been watching this unfold for the last two decades. This is probably the best chance of public opinion swaying to favour civil liberties and I can't imagine it's worth blowing because of what the media has previously done.
Making journalists a protected class is not the answer, it just means they'll continue to push the agenda down our throats.
I don't support making journalists a protected class. That is just going to open the door to more abuse and make it harder to push back on the fundamental problems with the prevailing thought - people should be generally free to tell the truth about what is happening, without harassment by government.
If the media wants something different, I don't want what they want and hopefully they don't get it. This isn't an issue where people should compromise away the core principles.
They start out something like this: Police should not be a special class in society. They should not have any right not accorded to the general population.
Exploring that leads to thoughts like, "I can't just walk into my neighbor's house without their permission. Neither should police." and "I can't shoot somebody and walk away without consequence because of some emblem on my shirt. Neither should police." "If any action would lead to a particular consequence for regular people, it should lead to the same consequence for police." What's the consequence of systematically recording video of people walking down the street? Should it matter if it's done by a homeowner, a school administrator, or a police officer?
Pondering further, I come up with, "Police should be able to enter my house with a properly-served warrant. Should the general populace be able to do the same?" or "Police should be able to shoot suspects holding hostages in a blundered bank robbery. Where is that line for regular citizens? We really don't want that, do we?" Imagine if, for example, somebody were to embed themselves in a clock tower at a university and start shooting away. Campus security doesn't have any way to intervene. There is no SWAT team in the region. What if your friendly neighborhood deer-hunter takes it upon themselves to decide who the culprit is and use their own scoped rifle to return fire? Do they have the same legal protections as a police officer doing the same?
In the context of this thread: Diplomats can send encrypted communications. All people should have the same right. Journalists, by virtue of being people, should have that right. They have the right because they are people, not because they are journalists. Same for any other privilege.
News Corp Australia owns approximately 142 daily, Sunday, weekly, bi-weekly and tri-weekly newspapers, of which three are free commuter titles and 102 are suburban publications (including 16 in which News Corp Australia has a 50% interest). News Corp Australia publishes a nationally distributed newspaper in Australia, a metropolitan newspaper in each of the Australian cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth (Sundays only), Hobart and Darwin and groups of suburban newspapers in the suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth. The company publishes a further thirty magazine titles across Australia.[2] According to the Finkelstein Review of Media and Media Regulation, in 2011 the group accounted for 23% of the newspaper titles in Australia.
Any idea what Murdoch's market share is by readership, rather than by total number of titles?
Also by now I don't know if Australia has any cross media ownership rules anymore, so we could own a lot more.
And as a consequence of that, I think that the libs were able to do uncle Rupert a favour and cut away the cross media rules (completely ignoring the fact that IP streaming of entertainment isn't local news / news), but I could be wrong.
Just waiting for Netflix or someone to buy the cricket and footy and crush channel 9 and foxtel.
Contrast this to the Australian IT industry that could have banded together during the initial AABill "discussion" and simultaneously covered their frontpages with info to their users, protesting the draconian legislation.
Apart from Atlassian, nobody big decided they wanted to be apart of that. And now we've made our entire industry a "systemic weakness" into our user's computers and networks.
I still wonder when foreigners will stop buying from Australian companies because we're essentially a backdoor into any computer system within our reach. Not even the CCP have the powers now granted to Australian authorities.
The Australian IT industry needs a lobby group, and it needs it now.
Telling Cambodia that it needs a free press and needs to stop spying on its people is now basically impossible for any Australian diplomat.
1. The right to contest search warrants: Applications for search warrants to be made to a high-level judge, with the relevant media outlet to be notified and given the opportunity to challenge the warrant.
2. Protections for whistleblowers: Expanded safeguards for government whistleblowing, including an expanded public interest test. The outlets want to see a culture of secrecy replaced with a culture of disclosure.
3. Restrictions on secrecy: New rules governing what information governments can deem secret, with obligations to regularly audit the material being kept from the public.
4. Freedom of information reform: A suite of changes to FOI law to reduce and restrict the significant delays, obstacles, cost and exemptions that allow government agencies to prevent disclosure.
5. Journalist exemptions: Exemptions to protect journalists from prosecution under a number of national security laws. Media outlets can currently mount legal defences against charges under these laws but want this strengthened to exemptions for public-interest journalism.
6. Defamation law reform: Overhaul of defamation law to adapt to the digital era, address inconsistency across states territories, and ensure it is operating as intended.
[1]: https://www.smh.com.au/national/a-culture-of-secrecy-what-is...
What always comes to mind is the police busting into the news room of The Guardian in the UK after the Snowden revelations, demanding that computers be destoryed. That's something we'd expect out of Iran or China, but it seems increasingly common in the West.
I'm thankful to live in a country with a codified freedom of the press.
There is a cycle where thing X is scary and everyone gets worked up about it, and the politicians are given a free pass to sidestep the Bill of Rights.
Thing X might be drugs, or might be guns, and the laws might have those things in their title. But the laws are never really about thing X, they are about trampling the Bill of Rights. Aside: the biggest myth is that the gun debate is about the Second Amendment. The proposed (and sometimes enacte) laws violate some combination of the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 9th, and 10th Amendments.
Trust me, the last thing the Australian media wants is the first amendment.
They want freedom of the press.
The general mood in the media at the time the ball got rolling for these sorts of laws was that they were some sort of protected species who shouldn't be subject to them...just the general population. Some looked as though they were advertising their perceived sense of self importance and potential value to the governments of the time.
Sorry if this sounded a bit snarky, I didn't mean it to be, it's just that we should have been talking about this much much earlier than today, yet no-one wanted to until now.
It's all well and good for the papers to be in support of press freedoms, but they've been all but silent on on-going prosecutions of non-journalist whistleblowers such as Witness K (and now his lawyer Bernard Collaery is being brought up on similar charges), and the fact that journalists and Doctors aren't allowed to visit offshore detention centres.
The same newspapers redacting their front pages are those that fawn over Australia's anti-science stance on Climate Change and anti-humanitarian immigration policies. They're pro-authoritarianism except when it comes to what they consider to be their little patch.
Crikey and Media Watch are of great value in exposing the hypocrisy of the majority of Australia's mainstream media.
I would rather have flawed free media than none at all.
Here are some photos of the papers: https://twitter.com/i/events/1186056563900858369
You're in private mode.
Subscribe to continue reading in private mode.That 1964 book [1] really did seem to nail a lot:
"Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise."
For instance, I read a profile of Jacqui Lambie [0] in The Saturday Paper [1] the other week. I’m a Green-voting Fitzroy-dwelling hipster, literally, but I found it gave me a real appreciation of someone who I would have dismissed out of hand the week before [3].
Being a politician is probably a thankless task. I’ve no doubt it’s difficult. They really don’t get paid that much. I wouldn’t want to do it.
If you’re generally cynical of politicians as a people, I can’t recommend Ben Rhodes’ book The World as It Is [4] enough. It might not make you any less cynical — spoiler: politics is a shit-fight — but it might give you a little more appreciation for the fact that the people doing this job are just that. They’re mostly just regular people, who thought they could do good. (Rhodes was Obama’s adviser: if anyone has similar recommendations for Australian politics, I’d love to hear them.)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqui_Lambie.
[1]: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2019/09/21...
[3]: Actually, a few weeks prior, Jacqui sat beside us in the Qantas lounge at Devonport. We moved — mostly because of the annoying kids clambering all over the furniture and the toxic hellstew that is Sky News blaring from the TV, but we joked that we didn’t want to sit next to her. Now I wish I’d said hello.
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_as_It_Is_(book)
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/oct/20/from-...
She's get my respect as she genuinely seems to want to make a difference, not just make a career out of being a politician.
I'm not comfortable with low standards such as these. We are, for starters, in a climate emergency and cannot afford a "well, they're human, they tried" approach to our politicians.
Judge them on their actions, who cares about whether they're "regular". More to the point, "regular" people and business-as-usual neoliberalism is what got us in this mess.
I've read that piece about Lambie, did this bit not stand out to you?
> But later, when asked about immigration policy, she questioned whether Australia should select people on “moral” grounds. Did she mean Christians should be preferred to Muslims? She replied: “Yeah, I think that would make myself and many other Australians feel more comfortable.”
This is blatant bigotry against Muslims given that there's no good reason the prefer Christians to Muslims, all things being equal. The Christian Right is a leading force for destruction and oppression globally; the basic reason Lambie prefers Christians is xenophobia.
For the record I think religiosity should count against you on an immigration application because it's bedfellows with conservative politics and straight-out bigotry, but you don't get to pick and choose religions like that without revealing yourself a bigot and a xenophobe. I demand better from public leaders.
The other person who impressed me was Ricky Muir, from the motoring enthusiasts party who won a senate seat with 0.51% of the vote (via preference deals)[1].
He was very inarticulate (yes, that's not a typo - he was bad at public speaking), but he actually read about things! And voted in ways that made sense! I turned right around on him - I thought it was terrible he got in and it turned out quite well.
Rex Patrick is another senator who seems to do a good job.
I think this goes well for politics in the West. Politicians there "go with the flow" and almost never against.
I used to socialise with Cristy Clark social circles when I lived in Vancouver. On my naive questions about why things a, b, and c not got discussed, I almost always got a hushed response like "It would've been a political suicide to this and that camp."
Politics is very hard to enter, and very easy to be ejected out.
It is those who have the power to direct that "flow" of bigger social trends in which all mainstream politics happens that truly direct the nation, but such people are very, very rare, few times a century occurrences for a nation.
I worked part-time for a backbench MP for a while. There is no time off for a politician: if you are awake, you are on duty. At home? Constant calls and texts from colleagues, journalists and party officials. Out shopping? You'll be interrupted. Celebrating wedding anniversary at a nice restaurant? You'll be interrupted. Walking down the street? Insults yelled from cars. Plus you are expected to show up for everything. Every new classroom, every intersection being repainted, every Northern Districts Cat Club AGM, every school fête, every art exhibition, everything. And you are expected to fix everything, whether or not you are even the right level of government for it: immigration policy, local hospital, the roof of the primary school, potholes, rubbish collection, council rates, parking fines. You are blamed for thousands of things beyond your direct control and outside your legal control.
It is actually a terrible job.
How about specific suggestions instead of just "start from scratch" with no real reason to think it will improve things and plenty of reasons to think it could be worse.