With the current Australian government personally I think things have gone from bad to worse. Sometimes it is hard to comprehend that this is what the general Australians think a government we deserved but voila, this is what we got stuck with at least for the next few years.
One of the most disturbing things I feel about is their use of freedom as a relative word. They championed themselves as freedom fighters and it has been deployed as the main reason behind the proposed change of the Racial Discrimination Act. The advocacy of George Brandis saying everyone has the right to be bigotry had raised a lot of people's eye browse. When the proposed changes were announced, my first question was "Why do a bunch of upper middle class White Australians think they understand racial discrimination and thus can change the Act when in their whole life had never been on the receiving end of such acts?" That is something I still have no answers to. The proposed change was to protect the freedom of speech and expression but was it for everyone or just for some?
Surely under such change I should be able to call Tony Abbott and George Brandis upper class trailer trashes who know nothing about the modern Australian society. But then am I really free to do so? I am not quite sure.
Take the recent threats the current government has on ABC about cutting their funding because in more than one occasion Tony Abbott said they should do more for the home team but ABC failed to do so. The fact that the current Government questions the existence of ABC because it is not churning out propagating materials for Tony Abbott and his gang directly contradicts to the basic act of freedom of expression and speech. To think about this if ABC can only survive because they became a propagating machine, what is the difference between the Abbott government and other totalitarian states that they condemned against regularly? Do they still have to rights to hail themselves as freedom fighters?
Another case is the threat of future legal actions on artists who pulled out of the Sydney Biennial Festival because of their political differences on asylum seekers issues. George Brandis said artists should be liable for these actions as they jeopardised the Festival despite their contempt that a guy whose company was running the detention centres chairs the Festival. I do not know how close the relationship of this guy is with George Brandis, and I do not know what legal obligations these artists have with the Festival. What I can assume is that these artists have checked their agreements and knew that it was within their rights to do so before pulling out. Is this good for the Festival? Certainly not. Is it their right to express their contempt? Certainly is. So if that is the case and the government want them to be litigated, is that a violation of the basic right to freedom of speech and expression? I certainly think so.
For me freedom should not be dealt with in a fluid relative term. This is what totalitarian authorities do. Freedom, if you do have the real heart to upkeep should be dealt with in an absolute social term - is it good for the society? If one thinks that people have the absolute right to be bigotry, then people should also have the absolute right to condemn such bigotry, disregarding where it's funding comes from. People should also have the freedom to pull out of events due to differences in political views within their contractual agreements. If freedom is not protected in this way, then it is not real freedom and thus enters an age of true hypocrisy. And in my opinion, this is the age most Australians are living in at the moment.
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