Political goings on

What a busy day…

First of all, I read in 

baralier

  ‘s journal that the Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment has decided our ath­letes should­n’t wear human rights T‑shirts to China. As he so beau­ti­fully points out, once upon a time, we engaged in boy­cotts and sanc­tions over this sort of thing. But can’t have anyone inter­fer­ing with a coun­try we have eco­nomic ties with, what?

Then I read this hor­rendous art­icle in The Age about rape in mar­riage in north-east Vic­toria with a whole lot of people wringing their hands and saying “we had no idea this was so common”. Uh, it’s a crime… has been for a few years… can we have some action on it now please? Sorry to do this to you but I feel a need to quote:

Research­ers inter­viewed one woman whose back was broken while being anally raped and another whose hus­band hit her around the head and then held a pillow over her face while he raped her.

But I have some good news! 

crazyjane13

  tell us:

… the Fed­eral Court has over­turned the pro­posed ‘nuis­ance’ laws for World Youth Day (which I posted about here). The ‘No to Pope’ coali­tion brought the legal chal­lenge on the grounds that arrest­ing and fining people for voicing opin­ions that might offend the par­ti­cipants was a viol­a­tion of the right to free speech.

The Fed­eral Court agreed. The laws have been struck down, and protests, t‑shirts and condom dis­tri­bu­tion will reportedly go ahead as ori­gin­ally planned.

Which, as I just glee­fully noted on her journal, means the Fed­eral Court just con­ferred a right of free speech on the Aus­tralian popu­lace we haven’t pre­vi­ously had… because as far as I know, up until this decision, Aus­trali­ans *had* no enshrined right to free speech, only an inter­preted right to expres­sion of reli­gion (con­sti­tu­tion­ally, at least). And even more beau­ti­fully, it’s expli­citly a free­dom of speech that *limits* an abuse of a free­dom of reli­gion. Glorious!