Censorship in Australia

Those Australians are such an amusing lot.  Can you believe — they allow their government to decide what they are allowed to read!  As if they were children!  Go here to find the details of eight books which are banned in Australia (and there are lots more than these eight).  If I were Australian I'd be pretty pissed off that someone, whether acting with the "authority" (ha!ha!) of the Australian government or not, would try to tell me what books I could or could not read.

The Australian government also bans films — can you believe it?  How pathetic!

The Australian Office of Film & Literature Classification, which is responsible for deciding which books and films should be banned, presents itself as

Informing your choices

Huh? "Informing your Choices"!? A good example of government deception. If the Australian government bans a book or a film then Australians do not have an informed choice as to whether to read that book or see that film, they have no choice, because the government has already chosen to ban it. "Informing your Choices" here really means: "We (your rulers) will choose for you as to whether you should read this book or see this film. Leave it (kiddies) to us. We know what is best for you."

If you wish to read how the Australian government attempts to justify its role as censor then you can read their Publications Guidelines, which states:

The matters to be taken into account in making a decision on the classification of a publication include:
(a) the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults;

Who decides what "a reasonable adult" is? Who decides what these supposed "standards" are? That pathetic excuse for a [former] prime minister, John Howard? Or perhaps some faceless bureaucrat with a psychological problem, afraid of anything which challenges his (or her) concept of "morality"? And these "standards" are then to be imposed upon everyone in Australian society.

Different people, all of them "reasonable adults", may have widely different interests and values. This is a clear case of "the tyranny of the majority" — or actually a tyranny of a minority, since in a pluralistic society no set of "standards" is likely to be those of anything but some minority of the population, which, by means of the Office of Film & Literature Classification, is then able to impose its "standards" on everyone else. So much for freedom in Australia.

Increasingly governments are attempting to prevent public criticism of government policy, even when that criticism is based on scientific evidence. The Australian government is no exception.

Minister denies gagging scientists

Australia, as other Western countries, suffers from a pervasive censorship-by-silence, whereby what is shameful about the country or its government is simply never mentioned in the mainstream media or in polite society. The Australian government's treatment of Australia's original inhabitants, the Aborigines, is shameful. More, it is disgraceful. (The brutality of some thugs in the Australian police force toward aborigines, which the author of this website personally witnessed in the center of Perth in 2002, in full view of the public, is particularly disgusting.) John Pilger exposed this disgrace in a speech he gave on the occasion of his receiving Australia's human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize:

Breaking the Australian Silence

Australian Senate Approves Net Censorship Plan

On 1999-05-26 the Australian Senate approved The Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Bill to block information on the Internet. The Australian authorities seem to produce more than their fair share of stupidity. Is it something in the water over there? The fluoride perhaps?

Here is the GILC Member Statement opposing proposal. See also the EF Australia campaign pages.

It took them ten years, but they're finally back:

Censorship of Historian David Irving

Australian Government Denies Right of Expression

The Australian government has refused three times to grant a visa to historian David Irving. Some people in Australia (could they be Jews?) are afraid that if he visits Australia some Australians may hear him speak. With what consequences? Some might begin to think. Oh, horror!

In accordance with the principles of libertarianism enunciated by John Stuart Mill every person has a right to express themselves in public to any others who care to listen to them, provided only that that expression is not an incitement to violence. David Irving's claims that the number of Jews killed by the Nazis has been grossly exaggerated (see also Norman Finkelstein on The Holocaust Industry) is a historical claim, and clearly is not an incitement to violence. Therefore he has a right to speak. By denying him a visa the Australian government is denying him this right, in effect censoring his words before he even has a chance to utter them.

For further details about this matter see: Documents on Free Speech in Australia, and the country's Ban on David Irving. In late 2003 David Irving was finally granted permission to visit Australia to give public talks in defense of his views.

In November 2005 David Irving was arrested in Austria. For links to documents relating to the subsequent 2006 show trial of David Irving in Austria click here. And on the same page are links concerning attempted censorship of any criticism of the official story of "The Holocaust".

Censorship of Academic Research

In Australia it is forbidden to impune the reputation of the sacred cash cow of Science, as revealed in this article by Queensland Professor Peter Ridd.

Science or silence? My battle to question doomsayers about the Great Barrier Reef

Around the world, people have heard about the impending extinction of the Great Barrier Reef: some 133,000 square miles of magnificent coral stretching for 1,400 miles off the northeast coast of Australia. The reef is supposedly almost dead from the combined effects of a warming climate, nutrient pollution from Australian farms, and smothering sediment from offshore dredging. Except that, as I have said publicly as a research scientist who has studied the reef for the past 30 years, all this most likely isn’t true. And just for saying that — and calling into question the kind of published science that has led to the gloomy predictions — I have been served with a gag order by my university [James Cook University].

New York Times (2018-12-14): Australian Gag Order Stokes Global Debate on Secrecy

There is a criminal case unfolding in Australia [in December 2018] that shall not be named. The defendant is a figure with a global reputation, someone of great influence in the country and the world. The charges are serious and of significant public interest. But publishing news about this case is illegal. Judges in Australia and some other countries, including Britain, often issue gag orders that temporarily restrict the publication of information related to a criminal proceeding on the grounds that it might sway jurors or potential jurors. Sometimes, judges even require the existence of these orders to be kept secret. In this case, something unusual is happening — the sweep of the restrictions is so all-encompassing that the conflict between the public’s right to know and the defendant’s right to a fair trial is rippling across the internet and the world, touching news outlets and institutions in distant countries.

See also: An Australian court‘s gag order is no match for the Internet, as word gets out about prominent cardinal‘s conviction

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Australia: A Crypto-Fascist Police State
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