Slashdot Mirror
Australian PM Has Parody Site Shut Down
babbling writes "The Australian Government has shut down a parody website that mocked Australian Prime Minister John Howard. The website featured a satirical speech that 'apologised' for the Iraq war. The site was down for two days before a phone call from Melbourne IT advised the owner that it had been shut down 'on the advice from the Australian Government'. A mirrored PDF copy of the "apology speech" is available."
The answer is if you elect politicians who think you need to be protected from your own stupidity, those politicians may be onto something.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Politicians are in the public eye, and should expect satire and public attention. No one forced them to be politicians. Danish cartoons causing bloodshed, and now this. Does the Australian government think its people so dumb that they can't distinguish parody from sincerity?
What a miserable miserable world we live in.
He said that after two days of silence, a customer service representative from Melbourne IT today informed him by telephone that the site had "been closed on the advice from the Australian Government"
People know censorship when they see it.
People do not like being censored.
I suggest if you are an Aussie and this bothers you, vote John Howard and his friends out of office.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Don't they have free speech in Austrailia?
This wouldn't happen in the USA because we have free speech. Except if a lesbian is offended, then it's sexual harrassment. Or on campuses with a speech code. Or it you want to advertise cigarettes. Or alcohol. Or if you want to run political ads, then it might violate campaign finance reform, even if it's exactly like this John Howard web site.
So this wouldn't happen in the USA in the early 80s. We sort-of had free speech back then.
The current Australian government's reputation doesn't help them though...
Particularly they have a very poor reputation as far as "supporting civil liverties on principle" is concerned. It is one of the few governments that is entirely happy for the US to keep its citizens who are terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay (on the grounds that that way Australia doesn't have to deal with them). Their attitude towards assylum seekers is notorious worldwide. And the opposition aren't actually much better - they have just successfully campaigned to remove accountability for controversial drug approvals from the Health Minister [who might have to justify himself to the Australian people] and pass it to an entirely unaccountable "panel of experts". I wonder how long before John Howard realises that so long as you pass all the unpopular decisions to an unaccountable "panel of experts" then no voter can ever reasonably complain about anything you do!
Satire doesn't have to be "Ha Ha" funny. I'm American. I follow world politics fairly loosely, and I can tell that the Australian PM, wossisname, Um, Howard Dean? Nah. Oh, yeah, John Howard didn't write that. His political allies would shit kittens, then have him commited to the loonie bin for saying those things.
When you're mired in it, it's pretty hard to see what you're mired in. Anyway, the politicians are living pretty well. Stupid are the people who elect them. Ignorant really. I don't think they would get elected if the voters actually made an effort to find out the truth about the people they're voting for. If not ignorant, then apathetic, if not that, then despicable, because they actually want censorship of "undesirables".
What?