Australia is the only county with a link to it's own page on the list of banned games by country... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_by_...
And one of two pages with a link to it's own page on the list of banned movies by country, along with China... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_films
But honestly there were so many things, it sounds funny but I can't even think of particular examples right now.
Oh, smoking is a good example. Doing their best to push adults out of being able to smoke. You can argue it's as justified as you like, but it's still nannying.
There's a lot the country restricts because it thinks it knows what's best for its citizens.
It's different from claiming it's the best country to live in, as so many claim while grilling and nursing a beer.
https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/australian-population-gro...
And the reputation of being the best country in the world comes from city/country rankings which routinely have our cities in the top ten:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurabegleybloom/2023/06/21/ran...
Yeah, that doesn't matter. Most of that percentage is young Australians who buy a $2000 'round the world' ticket with 8 stops or whatever, and they just get drunk in every place. Most of them are not really bothering to explore the countries or cultures, and have no context to claim Australia is 'the best country in the world to live in'.
> And the reputation of being the best country in the world comes from city/country rankings which routinely have our cities in the top ten:
There are plenty of different lists, but sure, Australian cities often make it into the top 10. But not 1st place, sometimes not even the top 5. Which means Australia is among the best, but certainly not the best, which is the claim many Australians insist upon. Hell, there are plenty of countries with all the same advantages but less censorship and less jacked up prices, so that disqualifies Australia right there IMO.
The difference is Americans who bother to travel are normally self-aware enough not to claim it, while the Australians that do, are not.
Out and proud USA #1 folk aren't hard to come by, abroad or at home in the US, the notion of American Exceptionalism is championed proportionally just as much (likely more) than a blind adherance to Australia the Lucky Country.
On those two phrases alone the pro American Exceptionalism crowd do seem at their core to be true believers while the majority of those flying the flag of Australia the Lucky Country are all too aware that Horne coined the phrase with a sneer as a back handed complement.
I wouldn't say it's selective. Just the result of spending extensive time in both countries. Is it not just as possible you're being defensive?
> Out and proud USA #1 folk aren't hard to come by, abroad or at home in the US,
Right, and my point was the minority of Americans who travel tend to learn the world is a bigger place and their country has a lot of issues.
> while the majority of those flying the flag of Australia the Lucky Country are all too aware that Horne coined the phrase with a sneer as a back handed complement.
Not my experience at all. They say it just as seriously as the Out and proud USA #1 folk you refer to, maybe with a little more awareness and less zealotry, but not that much less.
No stranger than hearing English or French accents IMO. Or Canadian. etc.
> BTW, have you travelled anywhere, or is this "most have never travelled anywhere" just something you've heard?
I've been to just over 60 countries so far, and spent about 7 years basically backpacking straight, and plenty at hostels.
That's what colored my cynicism of "Australians travel so prolifically" - most of the time they just had short stops in a city and were there to get drunk. Maybe doing some guided tours as you point out, but rarely going off-road or actually traveling, meeting locals, learning about the culture, etc. You could say many Australians are tourists few are actually 'travelers', if that makes sense.
As they absolutely should.
Australia has a free health care system and smokers are disproportionate in their use of limited resources.
No, they shouldn't, lol. No excuse for it at all.
> Australia has a free health care system and smokers are disproportionate in their use of limited resources.
Many countries have a similar health system, and there are other solutions that don't impact liberty like taxing cigarettes and putting that money back into the health system. Which is already done of course, making your argument moot.
Do they?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Finance_Balance_of_Sm...
This seems to suggest by killing the smokers earlier, the government avoids paying expensive pensions, among other things people need later in life.
Obviously I don't support smoking, just nitpicking here.
Smokers despite being a net-positive contributor to the government's tax revenue doesn't change that they are a net-negative drain on society.
* Extreme drug and supplement regulations (in Ireland I can't even get melatonin or St John's Wort without prescription)
* Extreme focus on safety at the expense of freedom. Again in Ireland, it'll take minimum one year but more likely 18 months to get a driving license, and we're subjected to endless government messaging about driving safety even though we have one of the highest levels of road safety in the world. Correlation maybe but if that's the case, they've succeeded and should stop nannying us now
* Strict control of public venue closing times. It's frustrating being at a festival and everything shutting down at 11pm because it's a Sunday night
* extreme levels of control in the form of bureaucracy - I'd say Germany is the winner here. Getting anything legal or administrative done is a struggle
There's a lot more I could list, some big, some small. But the overall feeling is that the state has decided how you should live and wants to control all sorts of minor insignificant parts of your life that they shouldn't have any say in. How dare the government decide whether I can take melatonin or not? It's a small thing, but one of hundreds that add up.
This makes absolutely no sense. If the additional instruction has lead to one of the highest levels of road safety in the world, you're proposing that they should become less safe because it's more convenient for people?
The whole Anglosphere really seems to be in a race to the bottom.
I would venture to say that literally no mass shootings, anywhere, ever, has been the result of "one crazy individual". Certainly none of the ones that make the news. There's always a community, however loosely defined, that radicalized them into thinking that murdering people is a viable solution. That level of descent into madness requires support.
One guy, with issues, two guns, 35 dead. Motivation was revenge and fame. No community required.
Your statement is just wrong.
He wasn’t radicalised, look it up. He was just an evil git that should never have been allowed near a gun.
This is an extremely narrow and naive view of the breadth of what humans can and will do.
You say that, and maybe it’s true. But it’s impossible for any New Zealander to know that given it’s a crime for any of them to read his manifesto.
However, you’ve linked to a process that educators can use to screen restricted films to their students.
I have little interest in how New Zealand is run, but if I did this would be a massive concern for me. For the interested parties, the details of his motives are incredibly important. That was the basis of new liberty-revoking legislation in New Zealand, and you think that New Zealanders should have no reasonable doubt that their politicians and press (who may or may not have even read it themselves) weren’t portraying it in a way that simply suited their own agendas? Believing that the government should be the only party allowed to interpret crucially important information is very undemocratic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...
And even today a number of the shooters had specific targets in mind e.g. fellow students, teachers etc.
So driven more by individual rage and easy access to weapons.
The government on the other hand…
Crime existing is no reason to strip away our rights by dismantling due process and the rule of law.
I can point you to the New Zealand Act of Parliament that allows this to happen? I can link you to the reporting on the court cases?
The fact you don't like it doesn't mean it's not "due process and the rule of law" as decided by the people of New Zealand over the last 70 years or so (a lot of our law seems to date from the 60s or so, I assume this sort of this was discussed a bit in the general zeitgeist before then).
Also, individual laws and court cases can very much trample on due process and the rule of law. It doesn't matter how long standing they are.
Having parliaments and courts doesn't automatically result in a free society. It requires constant effort by the people to keep those institutions in check. When we fail to do that, then "the race to the bottom" ensues.
As for the other values, you think absolute free speech is necessary for a free society. New Zealand disagrees with you.
Edit: the US government disagrees too, actually. So I guess you are not free either? (Assuming your location here.)
Whether governments think this is okay is irrelevant. Governments have labeled all sorts of things as consistent with due process and the rule of law. Censorship, mass surveillance, waterboarding, drone killing, you name it. It's supposedly justified because there's laws and institutions that "authorized" it. I don't buy that. That's rule by law, not rule of law.
Also this is kind of besides the point, but when governments police the possesion of information, that's not only a freedom of speech issue. It's also a freedom of thought issue.
I made my arguments very clear. I don't support crime, ever. But that doesn't mean I support taking away individual rights essential to a free society.
You believe in free speech, good, so do I. But in a reasonable society everything has limits the only question is where those limits are.
I'm not doing the "think of the children" thing, I'm trying to probe the edges of the argument you are putting forth.
There are some people that think that possession and distribution of CSAM should not be illegal on free speech ground. That's a position I don't share. Where do you stand?
Or, to remove you objections to that line of argument, what about revenge porn? Is that speech that shouldn't be punished? What rights does the subject of the revenge porn have and do they counter any free speech right the publisher has?
This is a subtle and complex subject, I don't believe there are simple answers.
>Words mean things, and sometimes, those meanings aren't up for debate.
Wittgenstein would like a word (heh).
Can I get a source on that? I can't find what you described with a quick Google search (using "New Zealand CSAM Christchurch" as my search term). I do find some prosecution made against people who distribute the video (one of them with caption "target acquired"), but they were under terrorism-related law.
It seems absurd to go after mere viewer of the video, let alone using CSAM law of all laws as the basis of prosecution.
It defines "objectionable" content with CSAM as the first category, and then a number of other categories that would be First Amendment protected speech in the US. Possession alone carries a 10 year prison sentence, possession with intent to distribute is 14 years. The Christchurch shooting video and manifesto were both classified as objectionable by New Zealand's Chief Censor (I'm not joking, that's actually their job title) [1].
My point was that they are prosecuting people for political and journalistic speech under the same law they use for CSAM, with equally severe penalties. Hope that is a more clear explanation.
[0] - https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0094/latest/...
[1] - https://www.classificationoffice.govt.nz/news/news-items/res...
Please stop.
Just people disagreeing about where to draw the line on what censorship is acceptable and what is not. The US and NZ draw that line in different places.
It seems to me that Americans in this discussion are trying to win some kind of moral argument, where as I'm just explaining how the world is, not how it ought to be.
[0] - https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/397953/charges-laid-in-3...
[1] - https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/news/crime/16-year-old-admits-p...
From there, it's a basic request to the ISP for subscriber information, and a day or two later the police are seizing the poor schmuck's electronics. If they find christchurch.mp4 or manifesto.pdf, that's a 10 year prison sentence.
Besides that, even if it were a real threat, censoring speech is not the solution. I'm not sure if you have read the Christchurch manifesto, but it's garbage. Seriously NZ is doing the author a favor by censoring it. That way he gets to play the political persecution card and people are less likely to actually read it.
But... we aren't talking about the US?
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NZL/new-zealand/murder...
See that big spike at the end there? That's white identity extremism. The deadliest crime in NZ history, the one event that more than doubled NZs murder rate that year, was white identity extremism. It might be a bit of a problem.
Honestly, I don't see what you are trying to point out?
In NZ we have the Classification Office. This is the government organisation that classifies publications (books, movies, games, even technically websites IIRC?). The Classification Office issues a rating (PG, M, R16, R18, etc.) and it is a crime to provide restricted publications to people that are under the restricted age.
It takes quite a lot to get a publication outright banned. In some cases the Chief Censor will issue it a "only at film festivals and academic settings" rating.
Note: only egregious distribution tends to get any attention, let alone prosecution. People importing objectionable material for sale, that sort of thing. Back in the day when video stores were still a thing, 15 year olds would rent R18 porn and no one went to jail.
Yes, CSAM is the sort of thing that would be rated objectionable (I.e. banned) but the NZ censorship regime is not "CSAM laws", it is much broader and more comprehensive than that.
In this case the Chief Censor banned the Christchurch shooting video because of the harm that its distribution would do to the community [1]. This sort of decision is normal and expected in NZ.
The rest of the world does not look like the US. We don't need to bend laws past their original intention when we already have a functional system for dealing with these kind of issues.
(I'm sure someone will pipe up to tell me I'm a slave in Stalinist Russia because I can't watch snuff films.)
[1]: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/397953/charges-laid-in-3...
Does this imply that parents, or those delegated by them, would be commiting a crime by showing their children material out of the government's chosen age range? That strikes me as absurd.
Furthermore, how does this work with broadcast TV or Radio? Do the receiving devices need to implement a control?
Actually, this also makes me wonder, will a public library check ID for books that teens check out?
Technically, yeah. And on the face of it, that doesn't sounds great does it? But again, that ignores the reality of the NZ justice system. I wouldn't think any parent has ever been prosecuted for that sort of thing. There are many safety valves like police discretion, prosecutor discretion, judicial discretion. If it got to court my assumption is that the offender would be discharged without conviction [1]. Basically given a telling off by the judge.
Any cases of a parent, or anyone just guilty of showing restricted stuff to a child, that resulted in fines or jail time would include large scale offending (distribution for profit probably), or some other abuse. I could certainly see a parent that was showing porn to their kid, as part of the sexual assault of that kid, getting a conviction for this, but only as part of a larger case involving a bunch of yuck stuff I don't want to think about.
Without doing a bunch of research, the other circumstance I could picture a parent being convicted would be in the dark times of the past. It wouldn't surprise me much to read that Mrs. Poorlady of Mangakino was convicted of supplying a minor restricted material in 1962 and fined £100. But all countries have weird pasts, McCarthyism was a thing.
TV and Radio aren't "publications" for the purposes of the Act. That is up to the Broadcasting Standards Authority. See: https://www.classificationoffice.govt.nz/classification-info... and https://www.bsa.govt.nz/
And lastly: yes a library would check your id. Libraries do stock DVDs and will absolutely not hand R16 movies to 15 year olds. But it is rare for books to get ratings.
Books are assumed to be ok, and most go unclassified. But books might be submitted for classification if the publisher thinks it is borderline. Or if a member of the public submitted it.
So yeah, if a book was submitted for classification, and that book got a restricted label, and the library thought the book wasn't trash and was worth stocking, then yes, they would check id if you look like you could be under the restricted age.
[1]: https://www.willislegal.co.nz/discharge-without-conviction/
It's worse to have an unenforced law on the books than no law at all.
Did Orwell know about you?
Edit: Okay, not quite as bad now after you edited out the last line. Thanks.
Honestly, I am more concerned that you think it is kosher to have others not see/read it. You can choose to see/not see what you will. NZ is a lot of things, but I would not call it normal.
Oh, while we are at it. Have you ever wondered about why it was restricted? Because the manifesto from that guy actually predicted NZ gov response quite well.
This guy was successful terrorist ( as in, he achieved his stated political goal with violence ).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_in_...