[clug] OT: Protesting the proposed clean feed?

[Craig Small]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 09:48:58AM +1100, Michael Cohen wrote:
>   I dont see what the whole excitement is about - every few years the
> minister in charge - an uneducated technophobe that wants to appear
Because one day it may actually happen. I'm not sure what happened in
the end in SA but their legislation did get passed, this was the model
legislation that the Federal government passed to the states. 

The problem is that legislation is generally written "in full" but
refers to other pieces of legislation, mainly about definitions. So,
they took two (at least) pieces of legislation, added some extra bits
and then had something that would ban every single news site in
Australia. 

I recall at least one major news site pointing this out to the NSW
committee looking into bringing these laws in. They said something 
along the lines of "look at our front page (of their dead-tree paper), 
none of this could be on our website". That legislation got very close 
to being passed, mainly because the people involved had no idea of what
it exactly could do.

 - Craig

-- 
Craig Small      GnuPG:1C1B D893 1418 2AF4 45EE  95CB C76C E5AC 12CA DFA5
http://www.enc.com.au/                             csmall at : enc.com.au
http://www.debian.org/          Debian GNU/Linux, software should be Free