This is a very interesting conservative followup to the free speech zone issue. I think it’s good there are people on the republican side speaking out against it too, it is more a libertarian/citizen issue than it is a party political one. I think the management of political speech is becoming a major problem from the ABC archives to people begining to speak about blogs as something that should be regulated. I don’t think they will be able to regulate in any major way, purely because of the logistics, but it’s a matter of putting doubt in people’s minds so they err on the “safe” side.

The resurrection of COINTELPRO type profiling of dissenters is also very worrying because there wasn’t a good justification for those actions back in the cold war, when there was arguably much more danger than there is now from from some tin-pot terrorists. And to say it’s exclusive to America would be misguided, ASIO was doing the same stuff in the 50s and 60s as evidenced by the surveillance of the ABC and the removal of Jack Child (McKnight). The new laws are a disgrace to our civil liberties, which have always been lacking without a proper constitution.

Interesting that the republican spirit of the comment for which Jack Child was fired, “has been overheard to make derogatory remarks about Royalty”, would indeed lead to greater civil liberties if our constitution became more than just an Act of the British parliament (McKnight, 39).

My favourite piece is the reasoning of the ASIO chief, Brigadier Charles Spry:

I do not hold that a person who does not accept the principle of royalty is necessarily a communist, or disloyal to his country for any other reason, but I do feel that when a person has been known to be a Communist or near-Communist in the past, the fact that he holds such views now indicates that he has Communist sympathies still. That is to say, I cannot conceive of him making a definite break with Communism, but still retaining his Communist strong feelings about the Royal family. (McKnight, 39)

McKnight, D., “Broadcasting and the Enemy Within: Political Surveillance and the ABC, 1951-64″ in Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, ed. Gillian Swanson, No. 87, May 1998. link