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Comment by aplummer | Hacker News Reader

This is basically how it has always been in Australia.

Someone’s freedom to protest is not more important than someone else’s freedom to use that same space to get to work, live their life, etc. Protests have always needed to be booked in advance and are essentially always approved (with police protection included for neo nazis etc).

You seem to be describing the freedom of America (a right to a gun, but not a right to be free from the fear of getting shot) but it’s not like that everywhere, see even more extreme examples like the “guilty until proven innocent” case of libel in Australia.

I’m not saying either way is better or worse, just that this is the status quo really for Australia.

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> Someone’s freedom to protest is not more important than someone else’s freedom to use that same space to get to work, live their life, etc. Protests have always needed to be booked in advance and are essentially always approved (with police protection included for neo nazis etc).

UK too, if you want to do something large-scale you negotiate with the police about when is going to work, and try to give them estimates of numbers etc. And at the small-scale end, you've never been allowed to (for instance) block a public path or block entrance to a business you disagreed with.

In the small town I grew up in, in the UK, I remember the police intervening when a local animal rights activist blocked access to a cafe which had put ostrich or emu egg on the menu. She was fine to stand there with a sign and say her piece, but she was not allowed to either block the cafe entrance or the path outside.

I don't like these developments, but the argument I see a lot at the moment that protest has always been and must be about disruption, seems off.

Perhaps effective protest is about disruption, but we're not going to legalise (for example) shutting down of an airport by a handful of people if they claim to have a cause, because we may as well give up on having an airport at that point.

I don't know why you got down votes, this is largely factually correct. I don't know that these laws will deter protesters anyway, if you want to shut down an airport you're already taking risks.

Yes, doing that sort of thing you're already breaking laws. And presumably at that point you're so committed to the cause that this is a secondary concern.

Not that I agree with draconian new powers coming in to deal with those, but the scary parts of the new laws to me are the ones that allow police to do stuff like arrest the anti-monarchist protestors who were not planning on direct action. The ones that directly impact public speech.

I am at the mercy of the Guardian here, but I think there are plenty of questionable things in the recent UK laws and in their practical use:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/12/corona...

> we're not going to legalise (for example) shutting down of an airport by a handful of people if they claim to have a cause, because we may as well give up on having an airport at that point.

But the UK has had airports and such protests, without the oppressive laws. It's hardly even a time of much protest or dangerous protest - compare the 1960s or 1970s. People were hijacking planes.

Political freedom is not a threat; it's not only compatible with a functioning economy, it's the source of all the highest-functioning economies in human history.

I agree very much that the new laws are awful.

I'm just arguing against the people who are basically saying that protest is a) supposed to be disruptive and b) should not be prosecuted when it is.

The worrying part of the new legislation in places like the UK is how it is being used to target people who are not shutting down critical infrastructure, who are not causing property damage etc etc.

For others not of a Commonwealth country, UK + Australian ( + Canadian ?? ) Defamation Law is relatively unique in the assumption of "guilty until proven innocent" - although recent years have seen strong moves to reform this position.

See (for example):

[1] https://rabbitholemag.com/australia-is-uniquely-bad-for-defa...

Worthy of note though is that otherwise

> In many respects, Australia compares well with other liberal democracies. Australia’s Freedom Score (95 out of 100) is on par with or better than countries like the UK (93/100), New Zealand (99/100), Canada (98/100), Germany (94/100), France (89/100), and the US (83/100). The country regularly ranks high on freedom indexes and democracy indexes and all sorts of human rights and civil liberties metrics. [1]

Australia is considered to have greater than 10% "more freedom" than the USofA by some third party rankings.

Depends where, Quebec is closer to the US while English Canada is more like the UK.

Comparison here for the curious. [1]

[1] https://kellywarnerlaw.com/chart-differences-between-united-...

You should not look at comparative rankings between countries; you should look at trends. The best current empirical source is:

https://www.v-dem.net/

Accordingly, Australia is declining, like many other countries, unfortunately.

> The best current empirical source is ...

Is there any particular reason why

> the V-Dem Institute at the Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden [...] With five Principal Investigators [...] etc. [1]

is currently the best empirical source?

I can see it's a decent enough project, albeit influenced by both the University of Notre Dame and the Kellogg Institute, but I see no compelling reason to rank it as "the best" of it's kind and a few flags that suggest potential bias in viewpoint.

> Accordingly, Australia is declining, like many other countries, unfortunately.

Err... I did look through the V-Dem 2023 Democracy report (56 pages), read several parts at length and looked at the four (4) mentions of Australia and while I agree that many parts of the world are backsliding to what is described as 1985 global democracy levels ... there is no mention there that Australia is one of those parts sliding back and indeed is rated there as on the world's more democratic nations (#11 of 190+ countries)

[1] https://www.v-dem.net/about/v-dem-project/

> is currently the best empirical source?

Yes: a lot of academic research on the topic.

You can do that with V-Dem too.

> I can see it's a decent enough project, albeit influenced by both the University of Notre Dame and the Kellogg Institute, but I see no compelling reason to rank it as "the best" of it's kind and a few flags that suggest potential bias in viewpoint.

These are the same people; V-Dem was built upon the foundation done at the Kelogg Institute. Since then, V-Dem covers over ten universities and over two thousand academics.

> Err... I did look through the V-Dem 2023 Democracy report (56 pages), read several parts at length and looked at the four (4) mentions of Australia and while I agree that many parts of the world are backsliding to what is described > as 1985 global democracy levels ... there is no mention there that Australia is one of those parts sliding back and indeed is rated there as on the world's more democratic nations (#11 of 190+ countries)

I just briefly looked at the chart about liberal democracy rights; a slight downward trend from the late 2000s. You'd need to do a thorough analysis for a definite conclusion, of course.

> Err... I did look through the V-Dem 2023 Democracy report (56 pages), read several parts at length and looked at the four (4) mentions of Australia and while I agree that many parts of the world are backsliding to what is described as 1985 global democracy levels ... there is no mention there that Australia is one of those parts sliding back and indeed is rated there as on the world's more democratic nations (#11 of 190+ countries)

If Australia is declining "like many other countries" as the PP said, then it might not be called out specifically. You can go to their graphing tools like https://v-dem.net/data_analysis/VariableGraph/ (this one focuses on a particular measure and shows you how it changes over time in different countries), enter the measure you want (for this I looked at "liberal democracy index") and some group of countries. I entered Australia and the G7 countries, and while there does seem to be a peak maybe 10-20 years ago for them all, it could easily be some artifact. On this basis, I would hardly agree with PP that there is a declining trend in Australia.

Btw - once you've selected an indicator, you can click its name (white on dark grey) the box under the box under the graph and find information on it. In this case, it tells you it's an aggregate of liberal and polyarchy. Those in turn are also aggregates but it comes back to expert survey data. With survey data, you probably need to change the scale to original scale because otherwise the values in the graph won't correspond to the description in the text.

Protests in the US generally require similar arrangements.

Americans aren't anymore afraid of getting shot as Australians are of getting bitten by a venomous creature

Well it’s the number 1 cause of death for children, I would be worried about the thing statistically most likely to kill me, but YMMV.

Conversely, venomous creatures have killed approximately zero people in a hundred years.

Americans express opinions very different than yours. Gun violence is the number one concern in many elections now. Schools all now have mass-shooter drills and train students.

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