No Clean Feed - Stop Internet Censorship in Australia

Category Archives: Public Policy

Election Reflection

Well, finally it’s election day. I have to say that even though the campaign only lasted 6 weeks, I was heartily sick of it by the end. As I said in my post on the worm, I think the immediate attention on focus groups, opinion polls and knee-jerk reactions produces bad policy. It’s not policy [...]

Scanning Judges

One of the reasons I really liked working at the Supreme Court was that it was a bastion of intelligent eccentricity. Many of the judges were unusual people, but they were also intelligent, compassionate people. I know that at least some judges were aware of their eccentricity. One judge (now retired) came in to my [...]

A Shout-Out

We’re not in the habit of handling shout-outs on behalf of third parties, but we happen to think that this one is worthwhile and serious, and it wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t engaged in considerable vetting before hand (one reason why skepticlawyer in particular hasn’t been around much lately, quite apart from my encounter [...]

Too much of a value

Legal Eagle’s post on screaming children and deafened passengers on a long-haul flight put me in mind of an interesting (offline) conversation I had with Lorenzo a month or so ago. On LE’s post, I made this comment: I do think we have taken social disapproval of parents disciplining their children in public too far, [...]

They may be vile customs, but they’re our vile customs

Henry Kissinger once said of Saddam that ‘we knew he was a son of a bitch, but we thought he was our son of a bitch’. I think it’s fair to say that Saddam ruled his country with spectacular nastiness, but that he also did enough to garner the support of a significant chunk of [...]

Drawing a long bow – Gillard and cohabitation

Bettina Arndt wrote a piece in the SMH the other day which Paul Norton at LP has described as a “Bondi cigar“, and I must say I’m inclined to agree with Paul’s assessment. Jason Soon alerted me to the piece in the first place, and I must say I’ve stolen his heading for my post [...]

Call to new PM on net censorship

Heath Gibson reminded me in a post this morning that we have a renewed opportunity to persuade the Labor party to drop its ridiculous bid to impose net censorship. As he notes, because of the change in leadership, the party can now back away from previous policies without losing so much face (as it has [...]

We regret to inform you that the disabled will be mugged by their government (twice)

This is going to be a longer and much sharper post than I had originally intended. What first came to mind was an open letter to the new Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, pointing out a simple £50 million cost saving to the welfare bill, but then yesterday the new coalition government handed [...]

It’s still the stupid economy…

The new independent fiscal watchdog has downgraded the economic growth projections for the UK economy. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicts the economy will expand 2.6% in 2011, down from the 3% to 3.5% estimate given in Labour’s last Budget. The lower figure will likely increase the impetus of the coalition government to cut [...]

Background of judges

The appointment of judges in the common law adversarial system is always a controversial issue. There is a tendency for governments to choose appointments who are perceived as sympathetic to their political cause. This tendency is not confined to the more progressive governments, either, despite the fact that howls of “tokenism” seem to be louder [...]