EasyTimes, you can’t think that ‘surveillance of anyone for 5 days without troubling a judge’ is not a problem. It’s one thing to make it easier to catch criminals but another to invade the freedom and privacy of innocent individuals. This is akin to taking guns from licensed, law-abiding sporting shooters in the laughable hope that it will somehow reduce gun-related crimes by criminals who are unlicensed.

As Demos wrote, most Aussies are sheep-like (is that why the Kiwis come over here?) and will go along with what the ‘nanny state’ wants for their ‘safety’.

While calling this Fascism, the other extreme, Communism, would do exactly the same. Stalin wasn’t a great fan of personal freedoms either.

The Australian people are nurtured from a young age to be pro-federalist, pro-big government by the government. As we can see happening, this trust or blind faith that is cultivated can be abused by authoritarian politicians who want to take away freedoms, piece by subtle piece. Government elements (for example police forces) then advise each other on policy and the government complies. How could it ever be found to disagree with itself? So it becomes more and more authoritarian and bloated.

As for this particular law, it seems the media is merely proving how incompetent or corrupted it is. If printed on the front page I'm sure the news would have been a paper-seller. Why hide away something that could sell your paper? You could even hold it and make it front page the next day. And here is the problem of letting one or two entities own all the media sources rather than promoting competition: You have a single, homogenised stream of news, without any variation in perspectives or message. It doesn't matter what paper you read. You see the same news by the same writers, organised by editors who share a common employer.

Gibo:

The "mark of the beast" was [Hebrew?] code of the Roman Emperors.
The oldest known record of the verse, a fragment of an early manuscript of Revelation from the Oxyrhynchus site, Papyrus 115, gives a different number, 616. Nero was later to become 666, and it has been carried forward since then.

Cheers,

O.

$1000 for loaning a disabled sticker from your car, $400 for lighting up a ciggie on a railway platform; a hotline for dobbing on your neighbours kids for playing under a hose on a stinking hot day, and another for 'illegally' parking in a Disabled parking place. $250 for breaking into someone elses car.

5 days free surveillance by our protectors, freed from accountability.

We Shire folk are about to enter Lockdown season again, where the police will be charged once again with with the responsibility of missing the crims. and harassing the residents with virtual roadblocks, intrusive vehicle searches, demanding to know where we are going and general intimidation.

Morris Iemma is an idiot. Makes Howard look like an anarchist(maybe not).

Gibo, thousands of people over the last 2000-odd years have believed that the antichrist is alive in their day and time. Just because you are one of the ones today, doesnt make it so.