this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
64 points (91.0% liked)
Australia
3533 readers
69 users here now
A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.
Before you post:
If you're posting anything related to:
- The Environment, post it to Aussie Environment
- Politics, post it to Australian Politics
- World News/Events, post it to World News
- A question to Australians (from outside) post it to Ask an Australian
If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News
Rules
This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:
- When posting news articles use the source headline and place your commentary in a separate comment
Banner Photo
Congratulations to @[email protected] who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition
Recommended and Related Communities
Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:
- Australian News
- World News (from an Australian Perspective)
- Australian Politics
- Aussie Environment
- Ask an Australian
- AusFinance
- Pictures
- AusLegal
- Aussie Frugal Living
- Cars (Australia)
- Coffee
- Chat
- Aussie Zone Meta
- bapcsalesaustralia
- Food Australia
- Aussie Memes
Plus other communities for sport and major cities.
https://aussie.zone/communities
Moderation
Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.
Additionally, we have our instance admins: @[email protected] and @[email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Freedom 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.