Healing Australia

How should we go about restoring Australia to some semblance of sanity? Over the past few months, they have gone from bad to worse to absolutely unbearable. It’s ridiculous how bad it’s gotten.

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You wipe out the Royal Commissions which entire job is to suggest new policies for the government to adopt which spawned the Combatting Child Sexual Exploitation Legislation Amendment Bill 2019 that had the loli doll ban. Literally every senator of liberal, labor, greens and independent swept the changes through. It’s a very slow process though as queensland just adopted the loli sex doll ban last month. This ban is super focused on fighting exports of this material, so thats certainly to do with the current situation.

Last year their was a serious lack of penalties for importing or selling these dolls, Connie Bonaros and other lawmakers were upset the federal government had failed in implementing a ban on this stuff so they all fell back to strengthening their own state laws to deal with it. This country is as prudish as they come and things like libertarianism have never got a foothold here.

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The fundamental problem is that anglophone countries outside the United States lack a proper constitution on the 1st amendment. Australia, England, Scotland, Canada all have freedom of speech that is relatively free, but it’s not expansive enough to cover everything that ought to be protected. You don’t have a supreme court that values liberty in the same way the US supreme court does. Even some types of incitement to violence is protected speech so long as it does not cause nor likely to cause violence, that is how extreme we are when it comes to free speech! And you know what? I’m glad our supreme court has a history of being free speech extremists. Furthermore, Supreme court already ruled that fictional “child child/like” pornography, ie no real child involved, is protected because it does not involve a real child, but so long as it is not legally obscene. Other Anglo nations are not so expansive in their protections towards such speech.

In the United States, we aren’t perfect, example is obscenity laws do not require a victim to be illegal. However, there is very little interest in prosecuting cases under the Miller Test. The Miller Test has three tests which can indeed make it more difficult to prosecute and can create a loophole.

For example, the last test could allow your “gross fictional porn”, to be not legally obscene:
Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value

Do other anglo nations have something like this? As far as I’m concerned, fictional “child” pornography that does not involve real minors does not need to be considered “obscene” to be illegal in many Anglo jurisdictions outside the United States. Their obscenity statue could be less restrictive, allowing the government to have more discretion about prosecuting victimless crimes. Law enforcement attitudes in other countries might not be as tolerant towards fiction.

The First Amendment certainly helps in this aspect, although it has it’s flaws.

It does not sufficiently guard vulnerable and marginalized groups against hate speech. Letting Nazis say whatever they want has very questionable value, especially when something as basic as obscenity takes backseat to someone calling for an ethnic cull.

Violence (even terroristic views, so long as it is not advocated as part of an organization) is strongly protected, but reveal a single tit and everyone loses their minds. America has a very weird aversion to sex but are happy to allow some truly abhorrent things which are far less “spooky” than sex. The free speech absolutist view (I don’t like what you’re saying but I’ll defend your right to say it) is only valid imo when there aren’t weird concessions being made all over the place.

Some violent content (like that documenting a war crime) may be useful, but it should be kept off mainstream social media platforms, as it isn’t very useful outside that context, and it may distress someone. Alternatively, it should be classified, so someone can filter it away accordingly.

In some cases, a constitutional amendment catering to privacy would be far more appropriate, than a free speech amendment, like the ruling that encryption is “free speech” (all code is supposedly free speech). The court would have reached the same conclusion, but it turns the First Amendment into this omnipotent concept which reaches into the strangest places, and it would have made the precedent far sturdier. Or perhaps, it could be argued on both grounds, but with that is a primary.

In cases like Scarlet Letter IDs, IDs with the words “SEX OFFENDER” stamped on them, a right to reputation and dignity would have been more appropriate, than to say it “compels speech”.

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