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.
Copyright, censorship and an American-led digital world
Given how dominant US websites are on the internet, the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) would — if passed — have global implications. And with worldwide website ‘blackouts’, commentary on the subject has hardly been limited to the United States. Bernard Keane hasn’t let the loss of Wikipedia slow down his efforts to pump out a column on the subject, raising his concerns about the bills and how media titans are tackling the issue.
I’ve got to be honest, it’s not the most compelling piece of writing on the subject. For instance, quibbling over statistics about how much online piracy is taking place is a rather moot point — the fact is, piracy exists. Attacking the dubious origin of figures trying to quantify the trend may be satisfying, but it doesn’t change the parameters of the debate. Much closer to the mark is the lack of innovation within the entertainment industry. As Keane notes, the big players had every opportunity to set up their own digital distribution channels. But their negligence left the door wide open to the likes of Apple (iTunes), Spotify and Netflix. (Indeed, the evidence suggests that the availability of these legal channels has helped to dampen down illegal file sharing.) The old guard might be bitter about having to share the spoils of their business with new upstarts. But at least there are spoils to share — and in some senses, the old media companies can claim little credit for that given their own foot-dragging.
None of this is to suggest that content owners don’t have a right to protect — and profit from — their intellectual property. Indeed, it’s important for them to do so, because otherwise they will not bother to invest in content development in the first place. If no one were to ever pay for what they download, then there would be no commercial incentive to produce music, movies, TV shows, software, books and so on. (Yes, some would still exist — many musicians don’t expect to make money from their art, many coders contribute freely to open source projects — but output would be vastly lower, less diverse and arguably of lower quality.) The question is, in the digital world, what copyright enforcement measures are need to ensure the benefits of content production are realised at the lowest overall cost to society? Given the onerous burden that would be placed on internet service providers and major content disseminators — like Google, Wikipedia and Facebook — SOPA and PIPA certainly don’t seem to be the best answer.
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.
Evidence: too hot to handle?
Americans (chiefly those in the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico) face hurricanes. New Zealanders and the Japanese worry about earthquakes. And in much of Australia, we worry about bushfires. Without wishing to make light of the tragic toll they can inflict, natural disasters are part of the world we inhabit. But as inevitable as they are, we still try everything we can to stop them — or at least to minimise the impacts they have on us.
As Philip Gibbons notes, while many can offer up their own ‘solutions’ to mitigate risks, few bother to check the evidence to see if they work. In the case of bushfires, Gibbons concludes that many of the options commonly touted don’t have much merit. For instance, the Black Saturday bushfires of three years ago would not have been substantially lessened by more ‘prescribed burning’ (ostensibly to eliminate potential fuel for fires, but often too far away from where they would make a real difference). By contrast, greater clearing of vegetation surrounding homes would have offered significant protection. But this strategy puts a large onus on individual homeowners to safeguard themselves — less appealing than expecting the government to do the job for you. Furthermore, people move in to the bush often because they want to be surrounded by nature. That aspiration is kind of spoiled when you clear out all the nature.
And that’s at the core of the problem: for all the beauty of the environment, there is plenty of danger too. Those who live in the bush can’t take the good without the bad.
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.
