The ban on alcohol in some communities is (AFAICT) welcomed by those communities, which have massive problems with it. There are laws in other states which allow people to declare their house a “dry place” which is then enforceable by law, to try to stop anyone from bringing alcohol into the house.
I can’t tell you whether any of these measures work, but they aren’t implemented for reasons of racist suppression, from what I can tell. Also no idea on the porn bans.
I’ve just moved to Australia, for the second time. The censorship you talk about is trivial and easily worked around (Video game didn’t get approved for sale? Order in from New Zealand or Hong Kong)
The populace isn’t so much OK with the policy as unaffected by it. These policies usually come from SA and are usually rooted in religion, which still seems to hold sway there.
The appeal of Aus to this Brit is that it has space, so much space, and sunshine. And it’s not as downright crazy as the USA (guns, employment rights, healthcare etc)
If you have punitive anti-drinking policy, and a racial group susceptible to that problem, it becomes a racist policy. There's alternatives that don't set people with problems back even further.
I think you could also take in to the willful enforcement as another aspect to the law.
For instance, ACT police are known for not drug testing for cocaine, whereas meth and speed are. (At traffic stops).
This causes the rich, who can afford to take coke, to continue with their lifestyle, and punishes the poor. Using the justification of moral corruption.
For what it's worth, I am Australian, am ashamed of the countries history of treating the rightful owners of the land, but do agree that the alcohol issue is something that has more nuance than appears to outsiders.
Other things that are supposed to address the same issue, such as demonizing social benefits spending with budget control debit cards are outrageous. They are just weapons of the election cycle, and a way to recover campaign funds at the expense to the countries public.
>No it doesn't. A law does not become racist when one race disproportionately breaks it, otherwise every law everywhere would be racist.
I think you'll find there are quite a few folks that disagree with you on this point, some feel that laws can be considered racist exclusively because of disproportionate impact on specific communities.
Personally I think it just boils down to how people define the term 'racist'. When I was growing up (many moons ago), the term was used primarily to describe intent, but now it has expanded to include outcomes.
Intent is an increasingly imaginary concept when decisionmaking is partially or completely performed by neural nets and checklists. As such, outcomes end up being the important thing to examine.
I agree that it's important to examine outcomes. It's actually the fundamental measurement of a decision and if we recast 'intent' as 'desired outcome' then its clear why paying attention to it is important.
My problem is that I was taught that 'racist' describes an ugly mindset that would confer malice. That may be true in some cases where outcomes disproportionately affect certain folks, but it's clearly not always the case and implying otherwise just distracts the conversation.
Agreed, but this cuts both ways. Intent has a lot of moral judgement attached to it - if we're redefining a word to be primarily about outcomes instead of intent, we should also drop the implied moral assertions around it.
Mmm, I'm not so sure. Certainly the things it means about the person responsible for the decision are a little different - lots of people accidentally put policies into place that harm minority groups, etc. But if the outcome is the same and a person in power chooses not to fix it, it really doesn't matter what their intent is, it's a moral failure not to help the people who need your help if you're able to do so. I don't really care whether they say slurs in their spare time with friends, I just want my elected (and un-elected) representatives to do what they can to prevent people from dying of starvation or preventable diseases.
It may or may not, depending on the context. If you make abortion illegal, for example, women will disproportionately break it. If you make it illegal to drunk drive, on the other hand, and if men are more likely to break it, that's a different case.
Again, I'm not familiar enough with the causes or effects of these policies to have a properly informed debate BUT on the surface it looks like these rules have been put in place in partnership with the communities in question, in order to try to help what is evidently a severe problem.
But perhaps the reality is different.
(Edit - perhaps I do have the read on this wrong, and these policies were not put in place with community agreement, in which case they should be changed. In other states such as Queensland the 'dry place' legislation is far more voluntary)
What if the communities are the ones creating/supporting these policies? Are the being racist to themselves? As from my reading this is often the case.
I'm not an expert in this field but it seems to me you are vastly oversimplifying the policy and without context. And using language like 'punitive' seems unfair as I dont see how this is a punishment, even if one were to believe it was misguided or ineffective. And I respect this policy has flaws and questionable value, while at the same time feel its fair to recognise it is being done in co-ordination with the community itself and and with altruistic intent.
What are these other alternatives you mention? Please suggest. I suspect they come with a whole set of other flaws and failures as rarely is a solution to these problems without a flip side.
I feel like the sentence “the censorship … is trivial and easily worked around” isn’t as hopeful as it sounds like. Isn’t it bad to have to work around censorship? Or maybe I’m reading too much into it.
This is why I’m an anti-authoritarian first and a democrat second. Civil liberties are more important than democracy, they’re worth too much to let the masses throw them in the bin at the first scent of fear.
Same for me. I'd like to see many more small countries and city states. Or at least people taking federalism and subsidiarity serious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
Eg in a US context, there's no reason at all why they need to have a federal minimum wage as far as I can tell.
Different people have different opinions on how minimum wage works, if at all, but from what I can tell minimum wage is an issue that can be done at state or even municipality level only. There's no need to have federal uniformity here.
The issue is that all of those small separate states will do one thing or another wrong. This causes an outcry for centralization because the idea is that the central authority will set them right. And once the power has centralized it doesn't go back to the small states. Eventually people realize that the centralized state also does some things wrong, but now there's no alternative.
Where, of course, 'wrong' is in the eye of the beholder.
Many people cheer on Supreme Court decisions that forbid states from making certain laws or policies that their democratically elected legislatures and governments decided on.
I think the idea that the alcohol rules are authoritarian is misplaced and it’s more complicated than your summation. To have an informed debate you would need to be familiar with the situation on the ground, which I am only in passing, and (respectfully) I suspect you are not at all.
The “censorship” is not really any worse than the UK’s BBFC.
I know what these laws mean for me because I’ve lived here before. They mean very little.
As the Australian government rapidly moves toward an authoritarian police state, does part of you wonder if they'd be so cavalier if their citizens had guns? Or if that might be a deterrent to tyranny at some point?
I don't think it is moving towards being an authoritarian police state any more than any other western country, and I wouldn't want to live in a country where citizens had easy access to guns, and suffered the violence and mass shootings that seem to come from that, like in the US.
"I don't think it is moving towards being an authoritarian police state any more than any other western country"
The example on which this thread is based, and otherwise discussed within this thread (checking in every 15 minutes with the state or be visited by the police), is well beyond other western countries and especially the USA at this point. We'll see if that holds.
You imagine some ragtag groups fighting against the police and military with the guns they bought a decade or two ago?
Personal ownership of guns doesn't help that much. You need a lot of people, a lot of organized people. At which point you can acquire or even create the weapons you need.
The sheer numbers and equipment of modern police and military forces are overwhelming. You need a lot of people, good organization, support from the inside.
Not to mention you'll be hit with the media first, discrediting all of your efforts and painting you as a terrorist or traitor in everyone's minds. Then you're easy pickings.
I can’t tell you whether any of these measures work, but they aren’t implemented for reasons of racist suppression, from what I can tell. Also no idea on the porn bans.
I’ve just moved to Australia, for the second time. The censorship you talk about is trivial and easily worked around (Video game didn’t get approved for sale? Order in from New Zealand or Hong Kong)
The populace isn’t so much OK with the policy as unaffected by it. These policies usually come from SA and are usually rooted in religion, which still seems to hold sway there.
The appeal of Aus to this Brit is that it has space, so much space, and sunshine. And it’s not as downright crazy as the USA (guns, employment rights, healthcare etc)