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Comment by Aerroon | Hacker News Reader

I'm always kind of surprised by people who move to Australia. It's a country that has had an active policy of censorship on entertainment for a very long time - books, video games, movies. The fact that the populace is okay with such a policy would make me reconsider moving there.

I've also read some really questionable things about policies regarding aboriginals in the northern territories. In 2007 the government 'temporarily' banned alcohol and porn for aboriginals as an 'emergency' measure.[0] And apparently it, or some replacement, is still in effect.[1]

Edit: also, turns out that banning alcohol doesn't get rid of alcohol consumption.[2] Who knew?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jun/21/australia.jame...

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-17/nt-police-commissione...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-07/qld-mornington-island...

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The ban on alcohol in some communities is (AFAICT) welcomed by those communities, which have massive problems with it. There are laws in other states which allow people to declare their house a “dry place” which is then enforceable by law, to try to stop anyone from bringing alcohol into the house.

I can’t tell you whether any of these measures work, but they aren’t implemented for reasons of racist suppression, from what I can tell. Also no idea on the porn bans.

I’ve just moved to Australia, for the second time. The censorship you talk about is trivial and easily worked around (Video game didn’t get approved for sale? Order in from New Zealand or Hong Kong)

The populace isn’t so much OK with the policy as unaffected by it. These policies usually come from SA and are usually rooted in religion, which still seems to hold sway there.

The appeal of Aus to this Brit is that it has space, so much space, and sunshine. And it’s not as downright crazy as the USA (guns, employment rights, healthcare etc)

If you have punitive anti-drinking policy, and a racial group susceptible to that problem, it becomes a racist policy. There's alternatives that don't set people with problems back even further.

> If you have punitive anti-drinking policy, and a racial group susceptible to that problem, it becomes a racist policy.

No it doesn't. A law does not become racist when one race disproportionately breaks it, otherwise every law everywhere would be racist.

I think you could also take in to the willful enforcement as another aspect to the law.

For instance, ACT police are known for not drug testing for cocaine, whereas meth and speed are. (At traffic stops).

This causes the rich, who can afford to take coke, to continue with their lifestyle, and punishes the poor. Using the justification of moral corruption.

For what it's worth, I am Australian, am ashamed of the countries history of treating the rightful owners of the land, but do agree that the alcohol issue is something that has more nuance than appears to outsiders.

Other things that are supposed to address the same issue, such as demonizing social benefits spending with budget control debit cards are outrageous. They are just weapons of the election cycle, and a way to recover campaign funds at the expense to the countries public.

>No it doesn't. A law does not become racist when one race disproportionately breaks it, otherwise every law everywhere would be racist.

I think you'll find there are quite a few folks that disagree with you on this point, some feel that laws can be considered racist exclusively because of disproportionate impact on specific communities.

Personally I think it just boils down to how people define the term 'racist'. When I was growing up (many moons ago), the term was used primarily to describe intent, but now it has expanded to include outcomes.

Intent is an increasingly imaginary concept when decisionmaking is partially or completely performed by neural nets and checklists. As such, outcomes end up being the important thing to examine.

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

I agree that it's important to examine outcomes. It's actually the fundamental measurement of a decision and if we recast 'intent' as 'desired outcome' then its clear why paying attention to it is important.

My problem is that I was taught that 'racist' describes an ugly mindset that would confer malice. That may be true in some cases where outcomes disproportionately affect certain folks, but it's clearly not always the case and implying otherwise just distracts the conversation.

Agreed, but this cuts both ways. Intent has a lot of moral judgement attached to it - if we're redefining a word to be primarily about outcomes instead of intent, we should also drop the implied moral assertions around it.

Mmm, I'm not so sure. Certainly the things it means about the person responsible for the decision are a little different - lots of people accidentally put policies into place that harm minority groups, etc. But if the outcome is the same and a person in power chooses not to fix it, it really doesn't matter what their intent is, it's a moral failure not to help the people who need your help if you're able to do so. I don't really care whether they say slurs in their spare time with friends, I just want my elected (and un-elected) representatives to do what they can to prevent people from dying of starvation or preventable diseases.

It may or may not, depending on the context. If you make abortion illegal, for example, women will disproportionately break it. If you make it illegal to drunk drive, on the other hand, and if men are more likely to break it, that's a different case.

Alcohol is banned for everyone in Australia? Imagine how that would go over.

Do these policies push people back even further?

Again, I'm not familiar enough with the causes or effects of these policies to have a properly informed debate BUT on the surface it looks like these rules have been put in place in partnership with the communities in question, in order to try to help what is evidently a severe problem.

But perhaps the reality is different.

(Edit - perhaps I do have the read on this wrong, and these policies were not put in place with community agreement, in which case they should be changed. In other states such as Queensland the 'dry place' legislation is far more voluntary)

What if the communities are the ones creating/supporting these policies? Are the being racist to themselves? As from my reading this is often the case.

I'm not an expert in this field but it seems to me you are vastly oversimplifying the policy and without context. And using language like 'punitive' seems unfair as I dont see how this is a punishment, even if one were to believe it was misguided or ineffective. And I respect this policy has flaws and questionable value, while at the same time feel its fair to recognise it is being done in co-ordination with the community itself and and with altruistic intent.

What are these other alternatives you mention? Please suggest. I suspect they come with a whole set of other flaws and failures as rarely is a solution to these problems without a flip side.

I feel like the sentence “the censorship … is trivial and easily worked around” isn’t as hopeful as it sounds like. Isn’t it bad to have to work around censorship? Or maybe I’m reading too much into it.

So your points arethat “some people like authoritarian measures” and “the censorship isn’t bad because today you can get around it”.

Sounds like you have a vested interest in not realizing what these new laws mean for you.

> So your points arethat “some people like authoritarian measures” and [...]

Well, that's how democracy is supposed to work, ain't it?

This is why I’m an anti-authoritarian first and a democrat second. Civil liberties are more important than democracy, they’re worth too much to let the masses throw them in the bin at the first scent of fear.

Same for me. I'd like to see many more small countries and city states. Or at least people taking federalism and subsidiarity serious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

That's because people seem to be much more reasonable when voting with their feet and wallets, then when voting at the polling booth. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter for some background.)

Eg in a US context, there's no reason at all why they need to have a federal minimum wage as far as I can tell.

Different people have different opinions on how minimum wage works, if at all, but from what I can tell minimum wage is an issue that can be done at state or even municipality level only. There's no need to have federal uniformity here.

The issue is that all of those small separate states will do one thing or another wrong. This causes an outcry for centralization because the idea is that the central authority will set them right. And once the power has centralized it doesn't go back to the small states. Eventually people realize that the centralized state also does some things wrong, but now there's no alternative.

Where, of course, 'wrong' is in the eye of the beholder.

Many people cheer on Supreme Court decisions that forbid states from making certain laws or policies that their democratically elected legislatures and governments decided on.

I think the idea that the alcohol rules are authoritarian is misplaced and it’s more complicated than your summation. To have an informed debate you would need to be familiar with the situation on the ground, which I am only in passing, and (respectfully) I suspect you are not at all.

The “censorship” is not really any worse than the UK’s BBFC.

I know what these laws mean for me because I’ve lived here before. They mean very little.

As the Australian government rapidly moves toward an authoritarian police state, does part of you wonder if they'd be so cavalier if their citizens had guns? Or if that might be a deterrent to tyranny at some point?

I don't think it is moving towards being an authoritarian police state any more than any other western country, and I wouldn't want to live in a country where citizens had easy access to guns, and suffered the violence and mass shootings that seem to come from that, like in the US.

Hope that helps.

"I don't think it is moving towards being an authoritarian police state any more than any other western country"

The example on which this thread is based, and otherwise discussed within this thread (checking in every 15 minutes with the state or be visited by the police), is well beyond other western countries and especially the USA at this point. We'll see if that holds.

You imagine some ragtag groups fighting against the police and military with the guns they bought a decade or two ago?

Personal ownership of guns doesn't help that much. You need a lot of people, a lot of organized people. At which point you can acquire or even create the weapons you need.

Not really. Even an unorganized small group of armed people can create enough damage to the Police/Government forces that it's not worth the fight.

Perhaps in the past.

The sheer numbers and equipment of modern police and military forces are overwhelming. You need a lot of people, good organization, support from the inside.

Not to mention you'll be hit with the media first, discrediting all of your efforts and painting you as a terrorist or traitor in everyone's minds. Then you're easy pickings.

Seems like the Taliban did fine taking their country back from globalists, with a bunch of used weapons from the 70s and Toyota utes.

Their country, yeah.

You don't have to imagine, look at Afghanistan. A ragtag group of people won against the strongest military in the world.

lol you're kidding yourself if you think having armed citizens would make any difference to authoritarian policy anywhere.

I've personally witnessed a single gunman absolutely shutdown and preoccupy the entire Philadelphia police forever for several hours. One guy.

You all seriously overestimate the capabilities of the police.

You're kidding yourself if you think it wouldn't. Didn't the Taliban just win despite 20 years of military occupation?

> I'm always kind of surprised by people who move to Australia. It's a country that has had an active policy of censorship on entertainment for a very long time - books, video games, movies. The fact that the populace is okay with such a policy would make me reconsider moving there.

That seems very bizarre to me. I'm not sure what you're talking about here exactly, what you've heard/read. Compared to which countries? Where are you, that censorship in Australia seems like a dealbreaker, or a way of feeling so superior? How would 'it' affect you at all? "The fact that the populace is okay with such a policy" - is it a fact, or your guess?

(Personally, the apparent US movie/TV morality of genitals or swearing being forbidden, but someone shooting peoples' heads off by the dozen being absolutely fine, seems crazy to me. The other way around would be far more sensible. At least for childrens' viewing.)

p.s. I just learned more than I ever knew about a history of censorship in Australia by reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_banned_in_Austra...

Age ratings in Australia are legally mandated, but the rating agency regularly refuses classification to video games. Until 2013, it was illegal to publish a video game unsuitable for 15-year-olds. The introduction of R18 for video games was a step forward, but it seems to be backsliding again. In 2019, Hotline Miami was prohibited from being re-released.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_in_...

For the day to day, actual lived life of an Australian, I can't think of any media I want that I cannot get.

There's a lot of media we can get that we don't want though...

Well to be fair the US bans alcohol for native eskimos in the Alaskan bush.

EDIT: I guess in the 1980s the government allowed the villages to make their own decisions to be dry or not: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/is-proh...

Interesting. I found this:

> ABSTRACT: When Alaska became a state in 1959, state laws removed control of alcohol regulation from the federal government and Native communities. In 1981, however, the state legislature changed alcohol laws to give residents broad powers to regulate how alcohol comes into their communities via a local option referendum. By mid-1999, 112 small communities had held 197 alcohol control elections under the state law. Sixty-nine percent of these elections added new restrictions on alcohol, while 13% removed restrictions previously imposed. The remaining 18% of elections did not receive a majority vote needed to change the existing status. Most communities passing local option restrictions chose to ban sale and importation. Although most of these elections occurred during the first eight years after the law was passed, elections continue to occur as the law evolves and as communities debate the merits of alcohol control. Although growing evidence suggests that the local option law may reduce adverse effects of alcohol abuse in Alaska Native communities, its most important contribution may be to restore to these communities a limited form of self-government.

[0] https://iseralaska.org/static/legacy_publication_links/Alcoh...

thanks for pointing that out, I edited my original comment to reflect that this isn't imposed on them anymore.

And any reservation where the tribal council votes to go dry, the Federal government will enforce it. (Well, to the extent that it will, you know, actually spend the money to have BIA police officers assigned to that Rez.)

Is that enforcement a positive thing or not?

Life on a Rez is so outside my experience that I'm not going to second guess tribal politicians on it.

>that the populace is okay with such a policy would make me reconsider moving there

When I had to decide for a job relocation whether I should move to the UK or to the US I had many issues in mind, wages, safety, public transport, childcare, culture but I'm gonna be honest 'censorship in videogames' wasn't very high on the list.

Not to mention that the discourse in regards to Australia seems incredibly hyperbolic in contrast to more strict countries like Singapore or China, which actually have significant limits on freedom of expression, and even in those countries for the average middle-class person it is almost irrelevant compared to safety, income, housing, and whatever else.

I'd like to say it just 'censorship' than 'censorship in videogames'. OP said 'books, video games, movies' so it seems that every media can be censored in the future.

Well, I wouldn't mention Singapore in the same sentence as China here. But I see your point.

You can say the same things about a lot of things in many countries, someone can probably say the same about the one you live in.

I suspect the censorship that you talk about are not as black and white as you seem to be trying to project. It's easy to cherry-pick the things that you don't like to get your own view across.

Not really sure what you are trying to achieve here than to push your own personal viewpoints on things that you don't like? I mean, I could say something like "I'm always kind of surprised by people who want to move to the US because the lack of gun laws", and what does that achieve?

> Not really sure what you are trying to achieve here than to push your own personal viewpoints on things that you don't like? I mean, I could say something like "I'm always kind of surprised by people who want to move to the US because the lack of gun laws", and what does that achieve?

The previous post simply engaged the original with additional comments on why someone might not want to move to Australia. You could always counter with your own thoughts on the matter. This is a place to discuss ideas. The post hardly felt pushy to me, and I don’t understand the skepticism of the poster’s intentions.

> The post hardly felt pushy to me, and I don’t understand the skepticism of the poster’s intentions.

Two things that lead me to thinking that:

* Blanket statement on censorship without providing further details and references * Picking a policy that affects a small part of the population and referencing articles that already say that many experts already find problematic

I think it's great that you could read the comment with good intentions, but the way that the details are presented and cherry-picked doesn't sit right with me.

I can only agree to disagree on your point that's just part of how we communicate.

> I suspect the censorship that you talk about

We're on the internet, you can look it up.

The USA has dozens of dry counties, most famously the home county of Jack Daniel's.

Like everything, the reality is more complex up close. We've never had to think too hard about what underpinned our prosperity, about the law that underpinned our freedoms, because they never failed too badly, for too many people. Perhaps we've had as much law as we needed, and when things chafed we have pushed for changes?

Australia has no official right to the kinds of freedoms you're discussing, but those books and movies were here. Economically Australia has always been top at nothing, top 10 in everything, and that prosperity meant people were free to choose a life they wanted and live free of coercion. Like the poster above, I fear we're embedding an inequality we don't have the will to resolve. But that's been the perpetual fear, that the luck has finally run out. I don't agree with the 'Intervention' the measures you mention in Aboriginal communities, but not because it restricted rights, because I think Aboriginal communities must be allowed to define how individual rights and collective obligations are balanced in their communities. I disagree with it because I don't believe it was driven by Indigenous people. Colonisation dropped a new worldview and law onto an existing civilisation and imposed it with genocide. Indigenous civilisation has different conceptions of duty and rights. If Non Indigenous Australia manages to build a new relationship with Indigenous Australians, I might feel I have the right to form my own opinions, but for now I don't think it's possible for me to understand enough to understand what is right for Indigenous communities, that has to be Indigenous led.

I detest the government that brought in the intervention, but in doing so they were supported by senior Indigenous leaders whom I respect.

https://www.abc.net.au/lateline/leigh-sales-talks-to-directo... https://www.smh.com.au/national/its-time-to-stop-playing-pol...

On my list of things to be concerned about as an Australian, censorship of media is pretty low down. It's not something we run up against in day to day life.

> It's not something we run up against in day to day life.

Perhaps consider that instead you just don't hear about it? Australia has some of the harshest defamation laws on the planet and journalists routinely self-censor.

When evidence of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan came out the federal police raided the ABC head office taking hordes of hard drives and documents trying to find out who was the whistleblower. None of the evidence presented by the ABC was ever contested and has subsequently been proven true. The raid has been deemed entirely valid under Australian law. Maybe that doesn't bother you, but it's clear that investigative journalism in Australia runs the same risks as many basketcase countries.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/feb/17/federal-police...

> In 2007 the government 'temporarily' banned alcohol and porn for aboriginals as an 'emergency' measure.[0] And apparently it, or some replacement, is still in effect.[1]

In 1976 France implemented a temporary permission to abortion, just to hedge the wave. A lot of social rights come from temporary laws that were never deactivated.

To be fair temporary permissions are harder to take back. It's not the same as a temporary ban.

That's such a bizarre take. I would love to meet these immigrants that care more about whether or not there is gore in Left 4 Dead 2 than social stability, health care, education and economic opportunities.

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