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The state of free speech in Australia

The state of free speech in Australia published on

I mentioned a certain  law in a Reddit thread about some guy being kicked out of a panel show for supporting Russia’s vile attack on the Ukraine and someone asked for a link so i went looking and here it is.

Amazing as it seems, in Australia you can get up to three years in jail merely for offending someone on the internet. Seriously. The law is rarely enforced, but it’s there and it has a chilling effect on those who know it exists, which is to say very few of us. Piss off the right person and you may end up spending a fortune paying a lawyer to keep you from going to jail for having called someone a fucking moron. I’m not joking about the lightness of the insult either. It just has to be something a reasonable person would deem offensive, which these days means pretty much anything.

As i said, it is not often used, but all we need is a cultural and political shift for it to start being enforced against any annoying anti-Establishment gadfly who does too much buzzing.