From what I hear from afar about Australian politics is that the Australian government can essentially do whatever it wants, unrestricted by minor details like a constitution, citizens or international law.
Surveillance, website blocking ... And not to forget the new definition of "asylum", where refugees are kept against their will in camps, "unfit for human habitation". One former government psychiatrist called it "torture". Including, of course, children.
But the system works reasonably well. I mean, why flee to Australia from political persecution, when Australian refugee camps are worse than most cases of political persecution?
Since this is presently the top comment, as an Australian, I felt the need to comment.
First thing to understand is that the Australian constitution is more about the formation and rights of the Government and less about personal rights as many Americans come to expect from their own. Australia is very strict about its obligations to its constitution, and issues like the roll-out of a single Goods and Service Tax (the GST) and the Tasmanian Dam Case which both had issues regarding the separation of powers and were heavily debated.
Nothing in the Australian constitution or any foreign treaty Australian is a signature of prevents Australia from passing this law. The Constitution of Australia grants the Federal government power to legislate in this matter. The law was passed with votes in the house from both of the major parties.
To be fair, your mention of Australia's refugee obligations and how it has handles it now and in the past is of no concern to this matter. There is very little reason to discuss that issue (even though it is worthy of being discussed) other than to paint the Australian Government as more villainous than an Australian might fairly say.
Well, the right to asylum, as well as human rights in general has been ratified by Australia and it's even part of the constitution.
I brought the asylum issue up because I find this a much more extreme and urgent example of a human rights issue than to restrict free speech to a very low degree.
Human rights isn't in the Australian Constitution, at least nothing about refugees or anything close to the American Bill of Rights. That's not to say it isn't part of our law, it's just not in that document.
Still, being allowed full access to porn does not seem as urgent to me as preventing thousands of children being physically and mentally harmed willfully by a supposedly democratic and elected government. So is torturing adult refugees to deter others from coming, but maybe the well documented harm to the children wakes people up more, than "just" mistreating some adult Muslims...
I fully agree, that free speech in general is very important, though.
How about forcing adults to die in horrible, dehumanising agony because the Powers That Be don't want you finding about safe, painless voluntary euthanasia techniques?
We have the slightly the same problem in the United States. We can talk about it, but we don't have a way to end life medically when that time comes, with the exception of Oregon, and one other state? I can't blame it all on politicians.
In American, it seems like many of us think modern medicine will cure most disease, or we fall victim to rhetoric like "death squads".
The reality is when that time comes, and modern medicine gives gives up; we are sent home to die. Oh yes, a bureaucratic nonprofit steps in and finally the aganoizing patient is given opioids, and benzodiazepines. The problem is the Palliative Care is hit, or miss. The doctor never seems to come around and read adjust medication levels, and the nurses--well they try.
My father died of liver cancer. He had a tumor the size of a football in his abdomen(by the way, he had a tumor for at least 15 years. I don't know when it turned cancerous, but all professionals overlooked the bulge in his upper right quadrant. Not one professional palpated his abdomen--I guess they don't do that anymore? And he had good insurance?
Well, finally one doctor promised to save his life, but reneged after further review, the hospital then sent him home. He was miserable all summer. The medications never quite took away the pain. It didn't help that the Hospice doctors weren't increasing dosages.(I looked at the dose of morphine, and I was tempted to buy smack off the streets, but he was just too conservative to break the law. My greedy, manipulative sister played around with his medication so she could talk him into giving her more wealth.(She is already extremely wealthy). The nurses, when told, looked the other way. My retched sister told the nurses, 'I want him to spend quality time with his grandkids'. My father couldn't stand kids, and barely put up with his own.
My father gradually went from 190 lbs to 65 lbs, and was beyond miserably for weeks. His last words to me were, "Son when will it end?"
He went into a semi coma and eventually died. He was blue. He would wake up from bad dreams and scream. He was in hell!
Sorry to unload, but we need to know just how terrible death can be. There's nothing sacred, natural, or peaceful about it. We need a passionate way to end life when that day comes.
I don't go a day without thinking about my father's agony. My father was a mean, nasty person, but they pain he went through was so disturbing; I can't get the horrid ordeal out of my life. It's been nine years, and I'm still not over it.
Maybe, this is not the time to talk about this problem? I got sidetracked by a comment before me--sorry.
It's never the wrong time to talk about this problem, and I'm sorry for your loss and pain.
My wife's father died a similar way, as did my grandfather. It pisses me off to a great degree that, as a society, we aren't willing to discuss the matter of dying with dignity. It's not like it's a new idea - the Roman Stoics did.
In many ways, our society seems infantilised in comparison.
Yeah the situation is pretty bad. Recently the human rights commission released the report about the affects of detention on children. The government not only ignored it but went after the head of the commission and tried to force her to resign.
I thought they went after her (Gillian Triggs) because she delayed releasing the report until 1) after a government-changing election result, and 2) the majority of children had been removed from detention as a result of new policy from the new government. The (alleged) intent behind her delay was to paint the new government as child detainers when they are (allegedly) the child liberators.
Apart from being grossly mistaken about the constitution not restricting government actions, there is nothing magical about the word 'constitution'. It's just law that is a bit harder than normal to change.
The US constantly talks about it's constitution, in pretty much every media channel available. It doesn't mean that the US doesn't engage in surveillance or torturing detainees. The US has done some horrific treatment of detainees - and if you include regular prisoners in the term 'detainees' (since they are), then Australia pales in comparison to the US treatment.
It's puzzling as to why people think that constitutional law is somehow magic.
Who says it's magic? It is, however special, because it restricts the ability of a democratic system to rid itself of democratic features. That's why it should be harder to change and be treated like a very delicate and serious issue.
For me, there is a world of difference between mistreating a relatively low number of terror suspects - and regretting it after a few years - and detaining innocent civilians, including children, without trial.
No behavior of the United States should dictate what Australia should allow itself to do. A state that treats people in that way will not be called a true democracy by me, though.
> For me, there is a world of difference between mistreating a relatively low number of terror suspects - and regretting it after a few years - and detaining innocent civilians, including children, without trial.
The US government has all these things, except perhaps the 'regretting' part.
Most of what we know about the torture at Guantanamo and other places comes from the government itself. I'm not a US citizen. I really don't believe anything the US is doing should allow Australia to put people in camps that have been labeled "concentration camps" by some unkind people, because of the pretty obvious similarities (extraterritorial, abysmal conditions, putting cost saving above basic human decency, lots of avoidable deaths, all ages, deterrence, "out of sight" nature ...).
The US prison system is stupid, no doubt. But even the worst prisons in the US are much better than what Australia is forcing refugees to endure. With the small difference that the US prison system doesn't have a 100% rate of non-convicted detainees, unless Australia's refugee detention.
You... honestly believed that I was suggesting literal magic, rather than just using a colourful word for special?
Anyway, I'm not forgiving Australia's actions on asylum seekers by comparing to US actions. I'm stating that "constitution" law does not prevent abuses. You say that there is a relatively small number of terror suspects? There is also a relatively small number of asylum seekers in offshore detention. However, the three million domestic US prisoners generally have terrible conditions. Where is the constitution protecting them? What about the police armed with military equipment that refer to civilians as 'the enemy' and have a problem with shooting black people? The constitution isn't providing much protection there.
Where did the US constitution protect over a million dead Vietnamese from a US puppet war?
Where did the US constitution protect several hundred thousand dead Iraqis from a war of US military adventurism?
My point is not to make a laundry list of US misdeeds, but to point out that there is nothing special when it comes to human rights and a document called "the constitution", and it seems the US talks about its constitution more than everyone else combined.
Just to reiterate, constitutional law is just law that's harder to change. It can be changed. The US Bill Of Rights is explicitly a list of changes to the constitution. Governments can restrict themselves further without a constitution - the UK has plenty of human rights legislation without a document called "the constitution". Likewise you can be signatories to treaties that restrict your government without making constitutional amendments or making domestic law.
On the other points:
> will not be called a true democracy by me
'True democracies' don't prevent abuses either. Democracies have a history of all sorts of abuse - apart from modern states, we can point to slavery-era US slaughtering its way across the continent, empire-building England, all the way back to the ancient Greek democracies like Athens... who kept slaves. And if it's claimed that these states aren't 'true democracies' as a result, then that's pretty much a textbook example of the "No True Scotsman" argument. 'Democracy' is not a synonym for 'egalitarian utopia'.
> detaining innocent civilians, including children, without trial.
You are aware that there were untried detainees in Guantanamo, yes? And if they're untried, you can't just claim them guilty-by-default.
> and regretting it after a few years
Give me a break. This is simply flat-out apologism. And just like the Australian people with offshore detention, the US people with suspects in Guantanamo Bay were split amongst those people who were angry, those people who were glad (some openly), and those people who don't care.
Our PM was recently waffling about not wanting to take particular cases (stripping Australian citizenship from dual citizenship holders who fight for IS) to court, because of the risk that the court might not agree with the request to strip citizenship.
Said PM displays a shocking lack of regard for the rule of law, and that approach is pretty much mirrored all the way down to the local Government level.
> From what I hear from afar about Australian politics is that the Australian government can essentially do whatever it wants, unrestricted by minor details like a constitution, citizens or international law.
No, all that applies, it's just the current government thinks it can ignore it.
Indeed, the 'liberal' party (which by the way is actually the more conservative one for some reason) has been rather overstepping its mark in terms of legislation lately. I have to say though the Labor guys aren't all that much better.
They follow European conventions, where "liberal" follows from the original "liberalism", i.e. the XIX century movement asking for trade liberalization (in a context of widespread protectionism by absolutist nation-states), a pro-business but socially conservative aggregation. Most "liberal" parties in Europe are right-wing in a similar way.
It's only in the US that "liberal" came to mean "socially progressive" for some reason, and only relatively recently (i.e. at least post-LBJ, I would say, if not later).
With these laws passed it will be a matter of weeks before the first cases of rights holders wanting websites blocked begin to appear, meanwhile there have already been statements by various right wing groups of wanting to expand the use of these new laws to cover other things they find objectionable such as pornography, violence etc. which will without doubt have a significant effect on free speech.
Source for that bit about "statements already made about blocking porn"? Surely no politician would be stupid enough to ever think blocking porn is a good idea.
> Surely no politician would be stupid enough to ever think blocking porn is a good idea.
You really really need to read a little more mainstream media (with a sceptical eye obviously). In the UK this has been debated for years now - and when one gets a new internet connection one has to (theoretically) decide whether to opt in or opt out of porn.
Just for those reading, the bill introduces an injunction power for the Courts to order ISP's to block access to foreign sites.
The important note here is that the blocking isn't done by the Government, as you might expect by those concerned about censorship, but through individual hearings to hear the impact and whether blocking the site would be a proportionate response in the circumstances (blocking an entire VPN provider might be disproportionate response for example)
Also it applies to foreign-hosted sites only, since running a hosting provider in Australian is already tenuous given we do not have anything similar to the US' safe-harbour provision. If you ran a torrenting site in Australia, there are already other laws which you can be tried under well before your site is blocked.
A explanatory memorandum was issued which has a lot of insight to the effects of the law. Check for the ID "legislation/ems/r5446_ems_1599ec23-c036-4dee-9562-a8a2e4d3d6fe".
At this point it is aimed 'entirely' at minimising access to copyrighted materials, but as is mentioned elsewhere, the text of the bill is written so vaguely that it is almost designed to ensure future scope creep. Not to mention the habit of the current Aus government to disregard pesky courts because 'They might not do what we want'[0]
We had a similar situation here in Germany, first they wanted to make an internet filter against child pornography, then they decided to add some filters for piracy...
That won't work here in Australia as the two major parties are, for all intents and purposes, identical. They both voted for all these recent draconian bills. We _could_ vote for the third party, who stands against all these things. But generally we are too smug and stupid to do something like that.
If you knew Australians (remember, we have compulsory voting) you would know that there is no hope in the ballot box. The sheer size of the bogan [1] voting block will make sure that any election will go to whichever party cracks down hardest on dole bludgers/boat people/sex workers/terrorists/dual citizens/Internet pirates/etc.
At the end of the day, as they say, we get the government we deserve.
It's more broad than ISPs. The bill refers to "Carriage Service Providers" (defined in Telecommunications Act 1997) which includes companies providing any service that carries communication. So as well as ISPs, you can include telecom carriers, VoIP companies, VPNs and anyone else involved in communication.
It's http://abc.net.au, and they are actually one of the best news organisations in the country (constantly having their budget cut by the party that is currently in Government because it's 'too left wing' or not 'on Team Australia' because they have often reported the truth about the Government...).
With this current Government, it's actually the Murdoch papers that look like propoganda straight from the politician's spin doctors. Especially Sydney's Daily Telegraph.
I guess a slant against government is required by a government owned media agency to appear non biased?. altho I imagine they can't be any worse than channel 7
Eh, the regulation of airwaves is necessary, though. Only one person can send at one time on one frequency, and often you also have interference on the frequencies around it.
licences and content regulation come later. change happens over long periods of time. Governments change a few laws, then the next generation accept that as the norm, so they change a few more until they get what they want.
Basically "the primary purpose of the online location [must be] to infringe, or to facilitate the infringement of, copyright," which gets around things like "we only host torrent magnet links" while shielding search engines, general discussion forums, and the like.
It's a reasonably well-drafted law (by the standards of such things) and relies on the judiciary (which is more than it sounds like considering our immigration minister, a former drug cop, wants extra-judicial power to remove citizenship), but falls down on technical merit.
How does website blocking work with https as the dns queries are encrypted. The only thing they could block is the ip but that could be shared with 'innocent' sites.
I may have a fatal misunderstanding in my understanding in how a browser accesses a website...
Meh...offshore VPS with Squid3. And that's just the easy way of getting around anything - it astounds me that the government seems to think everyone is as shortsighted as they are.
The Government is expected to include VPN's used explicitly for evasion of anti-piracy measures in this law. The Government even tried debating the definition of VPN, since that's obviously where a lot of people are headed with this recent change. Not to mention, VPN's are essential for Australian business and the Government can't blanket ban everything since A. its hard to even define what a VPN is, and B. even harder to capture and block that traffic.
To these legislators (and their backers) this is not a tricky question. They will (eventually) (attempt to) simply block all foreign VPN providers via DNS or IP and furthermore make using one illegal for private use. This will not affect BigCorp because they would be using VPN to connect to their own servers which would not be on the block list.
In the eyes of the administrator managing the block list (not sure what judicial oversight is planned but going on the UK's approach it will be minimal or non-existent) this would look like a dodgy foreign company and it would simply go on the block list....
How many major Australian companies use 1und1.de cloud services?
EDIT
Of these how many have the clout to have the block lifted when it happens?
EDIT
For the record I think that these laws are utterly stupid and totally unenforceable. (I say this as someone that pays for their content.) However, the legislators will not be put off by mere technical impossibility.
Exit nodes as we know them now may not exist, but the pressure that is being placed on this technology is going to caused newer better ideas to pop up.
Australians like stealing content. Nature finds a way!
Australians have until very recently had no easy and convenient access to content like comparable first world countries have had. We have seen the USA and other countries get all of these services offered to them but they've always skipped us by, leaving us to one hugely expensive provider.
They will even pay above the going rate in those other regions (VPN + exchange rate + currency fees).
Only to have the content providers come back with "No, we don't want you're money." I think this is changing now though as Netflix et al. become available, though I'd expect their libraries to still be relatively anaemic compared to the overseas counterparts.
Netflix are at least on record as saying that they want content to be global. However, they are also on record as saying that in principle using a vpn to access US Netflix is piracy (but that they don't think it is important). I am however curious what happens when some copyright troll decides to subpoena them for their records on who might be connecting from known vpns.
Brandis: "What the security agencies want to be retained is the electronic address of the website, that the web user..."
Interviewer: "So it does tell you the website?"
"Well it tells you the address of the website"
"That's the website, isn't it? It tells you what website you've been to?"
"Well when you visit a website, people browse from one thing to the next, and that browsing history won't be retained, or there won't be any capacity to access that."
"Excuse my confusion here, but if you are retaining the web address, you are retaining the web site, aren't you?"
"Well, the ... every website has an electronic address, right?"
"And that's recorded?"
"When a connection is made between one computer terminal and a web address, that fact, and the time of the connection, and the duration of the connection, is what we mean by 'metadata' in that context."
"But that is telling you where I've been on the web."
"Well it ... it ... it records what electronic web address has been accessed."
"I don't see the difference between that and what websites you've visited?"
"When you go to a website, commonly, you will go from one web page to another, from one link to another in that website. That's not what we're interested in."
is that a show of ignorance, or a politician avoiding a potentially damaging sound bite?
I'm not familiar with Australian politics, but in the politics I am familiar with I would be more apt to accuse someone of deception than ignorance.
The politician in the video seems to be purposely ignorant in such a way that drives a stake between the folks watching, posing the question "Well, IS there a difference between addresses and web sites? Maybe the man knows something the reporter doesn't!".
Check out practically any Dick Cheney interview to see that tactic used ad nauseum.
Surveillance, website blocking ... And not to forget the new definition of "asylum", where refugees are kept against their will in camps, "unfit for human habitation". One former government psychiatrist called it "torture". Including, of course, children.
But the system works reasonably well. I mean, why flee to Australia from political persecution, when Australian refugee camps are worse than most cases of political persecution?