Government orders spoof site shut
“A spoof John Howard website that featured a soul searching “apology” speech for the Iraq war has been shut down under orders from the Australian Government.
Richard Neville, an Australian futurist and social commentator was “mystified” to discover his satirical website johnhowardpm.org had been blocked on Tuesday with no explanation from either his web hosting company, Yahoo or the domain name registrar, Melbourne IT.
He said that after two days of silence, a customer service representative from Melbourne IT today informed him by telephone that the site had “been closed on the advice from the Australian Government”.
Mr Neville’s satirical “apology” speech ran on a mocked-up version of a spoof website that resembled Mr Howard’s own, and after going live on Monday, received 10,500 visits within 24 hours.
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Mr Neville describes the parody as an act of satire and culture jamming, and is now running a link to a PDF copy of the speech on his website.” (The Age)
Ridiculous. Even the US lets the parody site whitehouse.org co-exist with the official whitehouse.gov.
It prompted me to look into what rights Australians have to freedom of speech.
According to this research note on Free Speech and the Constitution from the Parliamentary Library of the Parliament of Australia, “Members of the Commonwealth Parliament reaffirmed the principles of the [Universal Declaration of Human Rights] during a sitting on 10 December 1998 to mark the 50th anniversary of the UDHR and pledged to give wholehearted support to the principles enshrined in the Declaration.”
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
However, “The Australian Constitution does not have any express provision relating to freedom of speech.”