Free speech is a very different subject than the rights of journalists.
Australians by and large don't want American style, unfettered free speech. And are quite happy with "say whatever you want so long as you don't libel or slander someone or some group of people" approach. It's what keeps our very multicultural society together.
What happened with the recent investigation of journalists is about the Australian government's right to see the drafts and sources for articles that involve investigating national security matters. And in general harass and intimidate journalists to discourage such articles in the future.
You can fix the second problem by enshrining the rights of journalists in legislation without having to make it a freedom of speech issue.
There's a chance of running into problems when you try and define 'journalist', though. If a journalist is someone employed by a major news corporation then you are going to disadvantage the independent journalists with not much more than a website, a good number of contacts in their address book, and a sizable Twitter following. If different rights and responsibilities are allocated to government-approved journalists than to independent journalists or regular citizens, then someone in that government is going to have to hand out the 'officially a journalist' card.
I might like the government in power today and I might really like them to deny the official journalist protections you envisage to the journalists from the outlets I think are biased and lean the wrong way. However, because there is a pretty good chance that, in a democracy, the other guy is going to win, I wouldn't look forward to those same restrictions being placed on the journalists I like to read. Hence, the best thing is to protect everyone's freedom to write and publish, to question authority, and to speak.
We could probably look to the rest of the West for inspiration, they've been navigating these grey areas in the interest of accountability for a while now.
It's still a developing science though, see the conflict over "was Assange acting as a journalist?", and the different decisions taken by different US administrations on that particular case, but it will still be kneeded out in the courts which is where we usually decide things like this which are open to interpretation.
> Australians by and large don't want American style, unfettered free speech
I'd argue that Australians, by and large, don't know that they don't have a legislated right to free speech similar to what they have in the US. This is evident by the shock surprise and outrage from Australians every time there is an action that stifles free speech.
> And are quite happy with "say whatever you want so long as you don't libel or slander someone or some group of people" approach
Neither libel nor slander is protected under the American first amendment.
> It's what keeps our very multicultural society together.
Australia has a very mono-cultural society. The "multi-cultural society" meme attempts to liken having a kebab shop on the corner to having conflicting cultures in the same area, which to me (as a non-Anglo Australian) doesn't make sense. Australian values and culture is quite evidently very specific (freedom of religion, freedom of dress, freedom of expression, etc) and we - both legally and as a society - reject any culture that conflict with this.
Perhaps the only other culture that is allowed in Australia is traditional Aboriginal culture, where we quite literally have a second set of laws to accommodate it.
That said, freedom of speech doesn't have any impact on this at all. I'm not sure where the link you're supposing comes from.
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In general, what happened[0] was intentionally misreported by the ABC.
1. The AFP obtained a search warrant for the ABC offices.
2. The AFP notified the ABC that they were coming to investigate in advance, however the ABC reported it to be a "raid."
3. The ABC dedicated a five camera film crew to follow the AFP around throughout the process.
4. The AFP had the explicit goal of finding out who the source was for revealing classified security information.
That's it.
It wasn't a free speech issue -- and it wasn't a journalistic rights issue.
I'd just like to put it out there that I very much agree with everything you said, and would have tried to write a similar post had you not already said everything better than I would have. Particularly the idea that Australia has a very multicultural society; we don't. We have lots of immigrants, but very limited cultural clashing such as is seen in, eg, the US where they actually have to manage all the different cultures they keep incubated. Ironically the fact nearly everyone is first- or second - generation immigrant promotes somewhat homogeneous culture although that is a gross generalisation as all generalisations are.
That said, there is one other point that deserves to be kept in focus - why exactly does the Australian government need to classify the fact that they are killing unarmed men and children. That shouldn't be classified information; if someone is killing unarmed children on my behalf I'd like to know about it tyvm.
I'm curious about the monoculture point. I reflexively disagreed with your parent post when they said it but now that someone else has agreed I'm second guessing.
Where is your line for where a culture starts and stops? Do we really need to be managing some kind of clash/conflict between the Greek suburbs or communities of Melbourne and the Lebanese, Hispanic or Italian ones for their cultures to be considered different?
Because they drive on the left and follow Australian laws have the Chinese population in Sunnybank abandoned their culture because they aren't clashing with the Anglo-australian population?
These communities are speaking their own languages, importing/selling their own ingredients and products, cooking their own foods, watching their own style of entertainment, practicing their own religions, socialising at unique times and locations, listening to their own music and raising their children in a style informed by their community's historical norms.
If you (and GP) formed your opinions outside of the major eastern cities, or haven't really ventured into the outer suburbs I could see how you could arrive at monoculture, but otherwise I think by requiring a "clash" you may be setting too high a bar for your definition of culture.
If you visit Oakleigh (I think Melbourne is still the city with the highest concentration of Greek people outside of Greece) and see the same culture that you see in the Northern Beaches of Sydney, which has the same culture that you see in Mareeba I'd be very interested in hearing more.
The freedom of religion is explicitly within a Western cultural and political framework.
For example, there is a long history of Islamic jurisprudence that also allows for freedom of religion - as long as Islam remains the 'established' religion, and other religions remain on a lesser footing. This is not obviously compatible with the level of separation of church and state in the West - but Muslim immigrants who might prefer a more theocratic system are obviously in the minority.
> have the Chinese population in Sunnybank abandoned their culture because they aren't clashing with the Anglo-australian population
Chinese civilization has had a markedly non-democratic political tradition for a couple thousand years, and many mainland immigrants lack a strong preference for democratic society. Similarly, Thailand has strong lese-majeste laws to protect the dignity of the king and royal family. These political traditions are pretty alien to the modern West, even though Westerners three hundred years ago would have found them utterly normal.
Culture is not just what you eat or where you worship, but encompass habits like 'How do we treat other groups?', 'How should we be ruled?', or even 'Is it morally acceptable to break laws (like evading taxes)?'
Immigrants are only allowed to act out certain cultural beliefs—the ones that don't threaten or conflict with the dominant culture.
I appreciate the comment, but I'm not sold at all. It's a stretch to say you can't have two cultures in a lawful society unless they have different laws or one of them is breaking them.
This is the first time I've really seen this argument, and it still feels like it depends on a particularly hard-line definition of culture if it asserts that a community has no culture if they aren't attempting to disrupt the equilibrium and establish their own nation-state.
While I can definitely see how political and legal structures can be informed by culture, necessarily including them as essential requirements is definitely not how culture or multicultural societies have been defined in any other interaction I've ever had.
Actually, the historical Millet system under the Ottoman empire went quite a bit further towards 'multiculturalism' under some dimensions, with different communities literally getting their own systems of laws.
But this strongly conflicted with the nascent notion of the unitary nation-state, much to the Ottoman (and Austrian) Empires' later detriment.
To be clear, I'm not claiming that there aren't multiple cultures in the West - just look at Amish or Hasidic communities as examples - just that they are still forced to abide by majority rules, which necessarily means that their cultures are somewhat abridged and shorn of their full representation. And note how small these communities are compared to the majority.
It's a rather different story in countries with multiple cultural groups with comparable demographic power, such as the former Yugoslavia, which was torn apart by these divisions.
Put under a different perspective, you can make a rather strong case that cities and rural areas are now different cultural zones in the US, and the intractable political conflicts over abortion, marriage, and even tax policy are byproducts.
> Where is your line for where a culture starts and stops?
In my view, culture is pretty fundamental, and when we run across a culture alien to us, it's quite disconcerting. And so a monoculture is one where you never run across any truly "alien" ideas.
You can have kebab shops and Thai restaurants, and churches and mosques and synagogues, and people speaking different languages, but as long as everyone agrees on the fundamental underpinnings of society, it's still a monoculture.
Australian culture is very open to everyone, so long as they are fundamentally Western in terms of their views on democracy, criminal justice, religious tolerance, women's rights, corruption, LGBT rights. That's so ingrained that when you point this out, there's usually a pause, and then an incredulous "well, yeah, both those are the only correct opinions!", or sometimes even a confused query as to whether any other ideas even exist in the modern world. I have the same gut reaction (I mean, obviously democracy is good, right?), but I also know that there are cultures out there with different views.
If Oakleigh has a lot of Greek people in it, you can probably get some rocking moussaka, but that doesn't mean it shares the same culture as modern Greece does. Consider, for example, the large difference in corruption between Greece (and much of the rest of southern Europe) and Australia (and much of northern Europe): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index If that survey was done on Melbourne suburbs, do you think they'd be fairly uniform, or would it look more like the map of Europe?
So can you name a multicultural city according to your definition?
I get the feeling your sentiment comes from never having lived in an actual monoculture, so what is multicultural just feels normal to you. Krakow and Vienna are very different compared to Berlin and London to name examples.
> So can you name a multicultural city according to your definition?
Dubai perhaps. The clash between the rich, western expat communities, the rich native communities, and the poor mostly Asian labourer communities is severe, and there are actual disagreements about basic norms.
> I get the feeling your sentiment comes from never having lived in an actual monoculture
I have absolutely lived in what you are calling monocultures. I've lived in small rural farming towns with a populations of less than 800.
Where we disagree is in the meaning of culture. Adding a chinese restaurant to a small town doesn't make it more multicultural or diverse in my view.
> Dubai perhaps. The clash between the rich, western expat communities, the rich native communities, and the poor mostly Asian labourer communities is severe, and there are actual disagreements about basic norms.
Except those groups never interact with each other. The implicit statement in a city being multicultural, is that as an inhabitant you will interact with these different cultures. I've never been to Dubai, but I strongly doubt you are going to get close with any Arabs or Asian labourers if you live there. I know someone who moved to Jerusalem, I was thinking maybe you would pick that city as an example, but I've heard that again the different communities live very separate lives, and they actively avoid interacting with each other.
Why do you say that the ABC intentionally misreported the situation? An ABC journalist live-tweeted the execution of the search warrant and claimed that he was the first to live-tweet an AFP 'raid' [1], which I think is valuable public interest journalism. I thought the reporting was accurate, although the journalist's commentary does presume that the media deserves special treatment, because of its role in our democracy and the potential chilling effect of the law as written on whistleblowers. This is a fair assumption and it's obviously popular with journalists, but I think the ABC would publish a contrary view if a credible writer wanted to put it forward.
Well, for one, it's not a raid. The fact that it has been presented as such is incredibly misleading. Then they tried to suggest that it was linked to the Australian government, spreading conspiracy theories about the timing - asking why it happened after the election and not before[0].
The AFP didn't wake up one day and send armed men to storm a building. After two year's worth of investigation, they gathered enough evidence to request a search warrant for a single ABC office which was granted. They then notified the ABC that they were on their way and entered without conflict to find and collect the data they wanted to take. Nobody was arrested, nobody was beaten, nobody was threatened. Nobody was even insulted during the process. The Australian Federal Police are not even allowed to access the data until ABC's lawyers have reviewed the entire process within a two week window.
I'm not sure how much more democratic that can be.
It's difficult for me to comment on this because I feel like I'm coming across as if I support an overreaching government. I support an extremely small government but one thing that catches me out is national security. The only role a federal government should play, in my view, is national security and I don't see a problem when they're doing exactly that in a way that dots all the i's and crosses all the t's.
National security is important, but so is whistleblowing, and the ability for journalists to protect their sources. There’s a trade off here between, and it’s worth looking at this from all angles to ensure that the AFP have the right intentions.
I accept that the word 'raid' isn't ideal, but I don't think it's 'incredibly misleading' when accompanied by photos that make it quite clear there are no armed men storming the building. What word would you suggest? 'Search'?
I don't think it's fair to characterise the reporting as 'spreading conspiracy theories' either, just for quoting a media spokesperson who 'described the raids as "disturbing" considering they have taken place so soon after a federal election.' This attributed comment was followed by quotes from the AFP and the relevant minister asserting their independence.
>Neither libel nor slander is protected under the American first amendment.
No but...
Valid defenses include: the statement is true. The statement is the speaker's opinion. And even if those fail, it must proven that it was spoken with malice. So defamation in the US is close to unenforceable.
Also a defence under Australian law, as long as the speech falls under the concept of "fair comment and criticism", which is the same rule the US follows (albeit interpreted quite differently).
> it must proven that it was spoken with malice
NOT a defence under US law, unless the plaintiff is a public figure, which is a category defined quite narrowly in the US.
> So defamation in the US is close to unenforceable.
There are a lot of libel suits in the US, many of them are won by the plaintiffs.
The difference in law is less than you seem to think, and what differences exist are mainly on the extent that opinions ("I think Joe is an asshole") should be protected; both countries agree that factual claims ("Joe murdered his wife") are not. And offhand, it's hardly clear that Australia had drawn the line in the right place.
Many, many western / European countries would find a “raid” on a journalistic organization to reveal a source a massive, massive journalistic rights issue. It would cause mass protests here in Germany...
Australians don't share the same political will and motivation as the Germans. By large we are a politically apathetic country with no strong leadership or vision for the future. We don't value personal liberties and personal freedom because we don't understand what it means not to have them.
We would rather be bubble wrapped and protected by the state than exercise personal responsibility.
I have lived in both countries long enough to see this.
Yeah if the last election result wasn’t a perfect demonstration of voter apathy and disengagement I don’t know what would be. Having said that, that’s just the majority - the rest of us are very engaged I promise! Just uselessly, impotently quiet.
The succinctly fits with almost every conversation I've had with Australians I've run into while traveling around Asia.
As an American I've immediately been thrown off with "why are you/they allowed to do that" or "there aught to be a law" or "I have nothing to hide-type conversations.
It's just a flat out different personal liberty viewpoint than I have. That's not atypical, but the quickness I find myself disagreeing is.
I'd like to preface this by saying that I don't consider threats to national security to be something that is a journalistic rights issue.
That said, in this case we haven't had a magistrate order a journalist to reveal who their source was, so journalistic source confidentiality hasn't been breached. Instead we saw a portion of a slow, deliberate and year-long investigation by the federal police with no pressure placed on the journalists themselves - either in the form of arrests or coercion to reveal secrets. So this still wouldn't be a journalistic rights issue.
I think most journalists would argue that they should have the right not to have their email searched by police to discover a source's identity, even if, as a matter of law, they don't.
The problem is the misuse of classifications to keep the public from finding out things which are in the public interest but embarrasing to the government.
The raids are the furtherance of the suppression of public interest material being made public through the media, so that is absolutely a free speech and journalistic rights issue.
Understand that this disagreement is over definitions/interpretations, not statistics.
The question is whether the populations are separated into heterogeneous cultural communities, or rather are integrated into a more homogenous society.
In my experience (having spent effectively all of my >40 years living in Melbourne) is that it's a bit of both, but that cultural disharmony is not a problem.
Freedom of expression and the right of government to retaliate against whistle-blowers do not seem such different subjects to me. They are at least highly interconnected, in what seems to me a fundamental aspect of democracy: that it allows for an informed public to make their decision through the ballot.
That doesn't mean that those freedoms need to be absolutely unfettered, but limits on them need to be transparent and well motivated.
They are obviously overlapping, but they are definitely different due to the nature of disclosure:
The press will be able to disclose otherwise 'privileged/private' information that one wouldn't be able to otherwise publish in terms of 'free speech', if for example it's evidence of a crime.
i.e. 'classified material' doesn't fall under 'free speech'. You can't just publish that stuff willy nilly.
But if some of that material betrays evidence of a crime, then it's 'fair game' in most modern jurisdictions it seems.
The difference between the 'press' and 'everyone else' is, in 2019 still super vague, specifically in the relevant area of being compelled to testify about sources etc. at least in the US, there's no clarity in the law, and some conflicting rulings.
I think the idea is that they're special in that they're performing actions in the public interest, and perhaps also some notion that it's a two-way deal: journalists for example aren't expected to dox in-field security services agents, under-cover operatives etc.
That sounds like a slogan, not something founded in reason.
No country has freedom of speech; it is heavily regulated... everywhere. The world hasn't collapsed yet.
How it's regulated probably matters; granted! But let's not get too apocalyptic about the issue. Not every regulation will turn everyone into mindless drones overnight.
And for the flipside: speech is only worth protecting because it's powerful; it's influential. You can insert the cheesy line about power and responsibility yourself...
It's a natural and good use of regulation to turn consequences for others into consequences (both good and bad!) for the person triggering them. Communication is not, and should not be, an exception.
Sure, it's a slogan, but you don't really have any arguments against it. The nature of the argument is slippery-slope, or syllogistic: If freedom of speech disappears, then freedom of religion goes with it. There's actually a tight binding between these two in the USA, since the same clause of the Constitution protects both.
No country has ever had truest freedom of speech. That doesn't mean that freedom of speech is bad; it could just as well mean that no country has ever been out of the hands of aristocrats for long enough to forge a freedom of speech which trumps their desire to be immune from the lower classes. But you're critiquing a position which has not yet existed and implying that the world will collapse if that position is realized, again without evidence.
The phrase "turn everyone into mindless drones" is telltale; it shows that you currently believe that people are not mindless drones. To the contrary, though, it's even easier to imagine that people have been gaining more freedoms through the centuries, and that people are turning into more mindful creatures, with less droning behavior. Even if progressivism is wrong, certainly the communication technologies that we have invented have given the everyday person a power of speech that empowers them beyond what their ancestors had.
Speaking of power, the cheesy line I'll choose today is that power and responsibility are formally dual in any category of social relations; if X has power over Y to do Z, then Y has responsibilities to do Z for X. And yes, freedom of speech is an insistence that this power not be abridged from everyday citizens. That's not a bad thing at all; beyond the progressive metanarrative, the slow and steady task of decentralizing and dividing power amongst people is important.
To summarize, you are suffering from tropes three through five from the list of censorship tropes. [0]
I'm saying that the whole concept is a distraction. It's like talking about absolute zero when somebody asks you to turn down the thermostat. It's simply not constructive.
The original linked article is better in that regards. At least we're talking about a specific instance, and considering what you want to deregulate (police, australia, warrants, government broadcasters, etc.).
If you have specific tropes from that link with specific reasons they apply and believe the reasoning is sound and applies here, I'd have a little more respect for that link . Merely calling something a trope does not affect validity; it's just name calling.
Also: you seem really eager to assume you have any idea what I think. I don't think you do! All I'm objecting to is the fundamentalism.
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I totally see the value in protecting speech; I just see it as a means to an end, not a divine calling. Communication isn't always constructive and clarifying; it can also be misleading and destructive. It can also be divisive (which sounds more negative that I intend - the positive flip side being forming a group identity perhaps?). I think intentional, malicious deception is almost universal regarded as not worth protecting, but where do you draw the line, and just as critically: how to you draw that line? I think there's a lot more value we as a society could gain from communication in general if we'ld try to improve here. Noise matters; incentives, not just restrictions and penalties matter; network effects matter. Regardless of where you live, but definitely in the US: the legal framework doesn't appear to be well equipped to deal with all that. If you will: it's a good attempt... for hundreds of years ago, but it's just not good enough anymore. These are rules that largely predate facebook network bubbles; predates game theory (certainly as a political force as in the 20th century); predates all forms of mass media that actually reached the masses (sure, there was a printing press - but what percentage of the populace did that really reach?).
Also, I want to make one more point, about how this discussion we're having matters. Because while I might quibble about the notion that freedom of speech is universally a good thing with no risks to be mitigated, I agree with the general notion. So for the sake of argument: let's assume you simply want to reap the benefits of that free flow of information. Got to protect that, right? It turns out the concept is hard to pin down exactly, and you need some approximation of exactness for a legal text to be a useful in practice. A law nobody can agree on what it means isn't going to work and certainly won't work as intended. So you do your best, and protect something; some definition that is close to the "ground truth" of the communication that is valuable to protect. Is that a perfect approximation? Almost axiomatically: no. And what's the worst thing (well... one seriously bad thing at least) you could possibly do to undermine the effectiveness of that protection? You could assume that it's great and that it works. Because that's when people stop being critical. There are all kinds of reasons people want to subvert rules like these, many selfish, some perhaps ideological. And after 200+ years of bending the rules, I think it's fair to be a little critical of the assumption that whatever ideas people had when they wrote those protections have survived undamaged to this day; not to mention that it's risky to assume that whatever ideas they had back then couldn't be improved upon in hindsight, and furthermore risky to assume that even perfect execution 200 years ago would be a perfect fit now.
And boy, have we tinkered over the years. Lobbying used to be considered a kind of fraud - in essence, the very opposite of the speech intended to be protected. Now it's protected itself. Freedom of speech would have applied to natural persons in 1791. Yet without textual change it now applies to corporations. And please don't think of this as good or bad - even if it's largely good, it's definitely change. Non-governmental restrictions and regulations on information transfer (e.g. NDAs or the reverse where you hire somebody to say something) would have been largely irrelevant back then (at least compared to now); and no surprise then that they're not addressed (AFAIK, at least). And even the prohibition on governmental restrictions are not terribly robust: the distinction between prior restraint, threats, and post-publication punishment is technically comprehensible, but conceptually pretty dubious. You don't need prior restraint if you treat whistleblowers the way we do today - anybody sane will shut up by themselves.
The US does not have a completely free flow of ideas. It has some a specific limited instantiation thereof. Not all communication is beneficial, nor is a government or court system all-powerful, nor is a legislative branch perfect; so limited protection is the best we should hope for. But.. not necessarily these exact limitations. If you say the US "has" freedom of speech or otherwise imply that it's good enough, or if you imply that the definition of speech is a given: you're undermining the underlying point of freedom of speech.
And spiritually: isn't the whole point of freedom of speech that a lively debate helps find the best solution to various problems? Then we should vigorously apply that tool to freedom of speech itself.
I'm not saying freedom of speech is a bad idea. I'm saying it's not perfect, and it never can be. But if we're not open to the imperfections in both the concept and our implementation, then not only will we be fail to reach perfection, we're going to stray very far from it.
Outside of the US, the world hasn't a great personal freedom track record (including Europe)...
disclamer: I exiled myself from Europe due the lack of objective personal freedom and opportunity. "Liberte, egalite, fraternite" has long been forgotten.
Well, the question of how you determine who is a journalist and hence gets these rights protected is still a difficult one. When is someone eligible for press credentials?
The US has a version of free speech that is more open than others and a good example for others (speaking as someone not from or in the US). You can say things in the US that would get you brought into a human rights tribinal in Canada. That could land you in jail in Germany or expelled elswhere. You do have limits around other's rights and terrorism but they try to strike a balance like most western nations. But the fact that free speech is a right by default is very different from other nations where its easier to censor if the view isn't morally acceptable.
And one day a right wing government will shut down left wing speech they call "hate speech" or "harmful" and your "reason" will take flight to the winds.
> Australians by and large don't want American style, unfettered free speech.
Most Australians don't know that there is no legislative or constitutional protections for everyday free speech rights they exercise. The High Court has had to stretch the constitution's wording to breaking point in order to rule in favour of more freedom on the side of the public.
Maybe we don't want American-style free speech, but maybe we want some other variant of free speech protections such as in any other developed country (we are the only developed country which doesn't have any free speech or privacy laws on the books). The entire argument of not having constitutional language for free speech was that English common law was sufficient. I think that view has been shown to be incorrect.
> And are quite happy with "say whatever you want so long as you don't libel or slander someone or some group of people" approach.
There are no legal protections for this kind of speech in Australia -- so if they're quite happy with it then they do want free speech laws. Also, America has libel laws restricting freedom of speech in specific ways (as does every other country which has free speech laws).
Australia is over 90% Caucasian, and almost all of that is English, Scottish, and Irish ancestry. Due to Australia’s strict immigration controls, the large proportion of foreign born is disproportionately of European ancestry compared to the foreign born in the US. Likewise, because the US has a longer history of immigration, many people who aren’t immigrants nonetheless are members of a visible minority group. Thus, while Sydney has more than 40% of its population born abroad, versus under 20% for Chicago, to American eyes Sydney looks very white and homogenous by comparison to Chicago.
Australians by and large don't want American style, unfettered free speech. And are quite happy with "say whatever you want so long as you don't libel or slander someone or some group of people" approach. It's what keeps our very multicultural society together.
What happened with the recent investigation of journalists is about the Australian government's right to see the drafts and sources for articles that involve investigating national security matters. And in general harass and intimidate journalists to discourage such articles in the future.
You can fix the second problem by enshrining the rights of journalists in legislation without having to make it a freedom of speech issue.