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26Jan

Why I’d vote no

For many, Australia Day is a day to celebrate — to catch up with friends over a barbecue (and likely more than a few beers) and watch the cricket (or the tennis, though no Australian players are left in the tournament). But for Indigenous Australians, Australia Day is a dark reminder of their history. It marks the day that white settlers colonised what was then regarded as an empty, unowned land — terra nullius. For many of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage, this was not settlement but an invasion.

Fast forward over two centuries later, and modern day Australia remains unsure of how to promote reconciliation between Indigenous Australians and those whose descendents have come to this continent’s shores since 1788. The latest initiative, in a report released this month, is to amend the federal constitution to — among other things — officially recognise Australia’s first peoples.


19Jan

The unfortunate truth is that if you want to change Washington DC, you have to buy it. And the big online internet companies, especially web-facing ones, have failed to pony up.

Mat Honan, Gizmodo

You might have experienced some difficulties over the past couple of days getting access to your favourite websites. Wikipedia was ‘blacked out’ from Wednesday for 24 hours, while other popular sites like Reddit and Wired ‘censored’ their content. Even Google got in on the act, slapping a big black block over its famous logo when its homepage was viewed by American users. The reason for these protests are two bills being developed in the US Congress — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) — that would impose new obligations on ISPs and websites in relation to their users having unauthorised access to copyright-protected content.

I won’t pour over the details about SOPA and PIPA each mean — there are plenty of explanations elsewhere — but it suffices to say that the two bills have got a lot of people fired up. Over at technology website Gizmodo, Mat Honan is one. He points the finger of blame for SOPA/PIPA at major online players, because they have failed to band together to lobby against such legislation on Capitol Hill. That might seem harsh on the surface — this ‘black out’ campaign has been pretty high profile, and already seems to have succeeded in convincing several congressional representatives (Democrats and Republicans alike) not to back the proposed laws. But Honan notes that even if SOPA/PIPA fail, there will be further efforts to come, because the media and entertainment industries are very powerful and well resourced, and will continue to fund hefty lobbying campaigns. (There should be little surprise that the lead lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America — a backer of the proposed measures — is a former high-profile senator, Chris Dodd.) Unless ‘the internet’ gets in the game, its capacity to influence events in Washington may only be eroded over time.


19Jan

Same-sex marriage will be legalised in Australia. But it is the complexities - the reality of difference - that ultimately have to be embraced if our society is going to be genuinely accepting of homosexuality.

Tim Dunlop, writer

Advocates of gay marriage commonly argue that there is widespread public support for the proposition. And certainly, I would prefer to see same-sex marriage included in the Marriage Act than the status quo. (Of course, if I had my druthers, we wouldn’t have government regulating marriage at all.) Plainly legalisation has staunch opponents too — religious groups in particular. But it’s also likely that there is a large bloc of voters — middle class, suburban mums and dads — who would be personally indifferent to the idea of gay marriage, because it’s simply not an issue that affects their lives. For them, it is not a ‘core’ issue — unlike say, energy costs, prices at the supermarket and interest rates. That is not to suggest that issues of equality should be regarded as subordinate to economic issues — after all, politicians should be capable of passing (or repealing) laws on important social issues without distracting from important economic issues. But many voters are unlikely to give more than a passing thought to discrimination unless they (or others close to them) are discriminated against.

On the issue of gay marriage, apathy is not the only issue. Within that likely large, personally disinterested group, there may also be some thought — though they might never articulate it — that there is something ‘wrong’ about homosexuality. This sense is understandable in the same way that I can’t figure out why anyone likes Victoria Bitter. I don’t know what it is in their brains that makes them think that VB is drinkable. To me, that seems wholly ‘unnatural’. Ultimately people have different tastes and preferences, and at a high level, that’s something virtually everyone understands. It’s in the details of our lives where it gets murky. “Of course, we’ve all got different points of view… but we must ban communist parties because they threaten our way of life.” “I don’t want to tell people how to live their lives… but people shouldn’t be allowed to get facial piercings.” “Sure, I don’t have to watch it… but we’d all be better off if reality TV was taken off the air.” This might seem to be trivialising the issue: it isn’t. These are all manifestations of the inability of individuals to tolerate specific differences, even though they might publicly avow (and genuinely consider that they possess) a general tolerance for such differences.

Writing for The Drum, Tim Dunlop argues that gay marriage will one day become a reality. But that on its own is not the end point for defeating discrimination — important though it is, it is merely one hurdle to overcome. Just as the community perception of gender has changed — for example, despite pockets of resistance, we are now broadly accepting of women in the workforce in a way that would have been inconceivable fifty years ago — so too must homosexuality be normalised in the public consciousness. Put simply, while we have made great strides in achieving equality in our society, there is much still to be accomplished.