Comment on The Voice debate is yet another ugly chapter in Australia's history
Nath@aussie.zone 11 months agoFreedom of speech the way our American friends go on about it is implied in our constitution as general freedom. We don’t explicitly have a clause that says you have a right to walk along the beach in PJs or jeans (or even both!). Yet, this activity is perfectly legal.
For some reason, they’ve gone and made a constitutional amendment specifically for this freedom. I’m sure they had a good reason for that. That doesn’t mean we don’t also have this freedom.
stifle867@programming.dev 11 months ago
It is a lot different actually having it explicitly in the constitution for all the same reasons you would argue for a yes vote in the upcoming referendum. You only have to look back a couple of years to find a time where your example wasn’t legal due to lockdowns.
Nath@aussie.zone 11 months ago
I don’t live in a part of Australia that had those restrictions on movement. We never had lockdowns in Western Australia like they experienced in the Eastern States.
But even then, the restrictions those places had were temporary in response to a state of emergency and not a change in our wider freedoms.
stifle867@programming.dev 11 months ago
I’m not arguing the validity of temporary lockdown restrictions due to public health emergencies. I largely agree with the measures. I’m just pointing out your example of “well our constitution doesn’t explicitly protect this, yet we can all still do it” is really not the same thing as having explicit protections of a freedom.
It’s more applicable with freedom of speech. Australia does not have explicit constitutionally protected freedom of speech. Which is never important until all of a sudden it is!
Look at what happened to the ABC a few years back when the AFP raided them after reporting on the activities of some members of our military.
Nath@aussie.zone 11 months ago
Military activities are a completely different thing. Just ask Julian Assange what the US military thinks about exercising freedom of speech in the context of military actions.