The Null Device

Keeping Australia relaxed and comfortable

Police raid film festival screening, arrest Margaret Pomeranz. The SBS film critic was involved in an illicit screening of critically acclaimed US art film Ken Park, which was banned for offending the morés of the Liberal-voting Silent Majority. Meanwhile, while the censorious climate has irked film buffs, it has given hope in other quarters; a Jewish group is pushing to ban two films from the Melbourne Underground Film Festival. One is a film about discredited historian David Irving, and another is a history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which is claimed to vilify Israel. (By the same token, when Senator Alston builds his national firewall, perhaps it'll be programmed to block Robert Fisk articles.)

There are 5 comments on "Keeping Australia relaxed and comfortable":

Posted by: Ritchie http:// Thu Jul 3 20:33:57 2003

I often wonder whether it is a new trend to conflate criticism of a nation's government with criticism of said nation's values/mythology/ruling tribe, or whether this has been with us forever and I'm just noticing now.

On the topic of banning the Irving film, nonsensical as Irving's arguments are, they need to be aired (or at least, not be banned from being aired) so they can be publicly ridiculed and exposed as lies. These Holocaust revisionists are getting increasingly cocky, and in a few more years all the eyewitnesses to the Holocaust will be dead.

Posted by: CNWB http://cnwb.blogspot.com Thu Jul 3 23:39:34 2003

One can only wonder if there are links with the Govenment's wooing of Harradine over cross media ownership laws. Didn't they pull off a similar trick when seeking approval for selling off half of Telstra?

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Fri Jul 4 05:36:15 2003

Yes, the Internet censorship laws (which, as tabloid TV programmes are showing, do little to stop kids from looking at sickening hardcore pornography) were used to buy Harradine.

Posted by: mihaly http://mailer.todaymail.com.au/fairfax/users/mkort Fri Jul 4 06:31:05 2003

Important issue this: and I think it has been going on by little steps for nearly two decades now. Someone made a point about i'net c'ship, in that it matters little really, if the big companies that run the search engines preferentially direct searchers to certain sites, it's quite hard to find dissenting views, and it will appear to the casual luser that one opinion holds currency that it might not actually have. And vice versa. reasonableness and fairness are different things.

Posted by: mark Fri Jul 4 13:19:16 2003

Andrew, as I recall Harradine then said "thanks, it's real generous of you" and gave them the finger. At which point Meg Lees came to the govt's rescue...