Ise Mise, you are quite right my Lord! A thousand apologies to you and your high born friends. The other points were correct also but I thought you would get my drift? Apologies again you were not as quick as I thought.
Regarding you and your noble friends I am reminded of the horse fly who was reared in a Derby winners dropping and who used to boast of his noble origins. Sorry, I am just being smart, have a happy Christmas mate and leave the poms alone for a bit.

JB,

Points taken!! And have a happy Christmas yourself and a very good New Year.

PS. I did know the postie and, on occasions was his Bannerman at Scottish getstogether.

In my view we shouldn't be having this discussion, because people should be free to raise memorials to anything they like. I don't understand your problem Joe (ps congrats, I see you have a book out - perhaps you should do a forum post on that, or write an op-ed for OLO to publicise it).

Because 18C exists an idea has taken root that we are not allowed to say certain things. It is foreign to the culture of our civilisation, and it is an impediment to progress and civil discourse. We already have an overly punitive defamation law, but apart from that the law should only concern itself with actions.

Any of the really bad things that 18C purports to protect against are already covered by other laws.

But worse than any of this 18C also only extends its protection to people who fit particular racial categories. So it is a law which discriminates, which is ironic when it is an an anti-discrimination act.

Graham said;
Because 18C exists an idea has taken root that we are not allowed to say certain things

It is wider than "certain things".
It is "anything that offends".

I could say I hate the way this or that race puts its tattoos on their face.
It seems the only proof needed is that they are offended.
The only reason the students got out of it was because they never
mentioned Ms Prior and they referred to the QUT not a race.

Hi Graham,

I don't have any misgivings over this monument on the grounds of 18 (c) but on the grounds that it may not be appropriate to put up such a worthy monument in Australia, unless Australian women were enslaved to the lusts of multitudes of Japanese solders. I'm not sure what 18 (c) has to do with any of it: my point is that, since a multitude of evils have occurred, even within recent memory, on every continent and in half the countries of the world outside of Australia, if monuments were put up to all those atrocities, often necessarily involving vile attacks by people from one ethnic or 'racial' or national group against another, whose members may now be living in Australia, we could be importing some of those battles, to be re-invigorated here.

Yes, there ARE limits to this line of argument: I would strongly support the monuments, such as the Holocaust Museum in Melbourne, against the most dreadful atrocities of the twentieth century; and a monument to the Armenian people (and Kurds and Yazidis) wiped out by the Ottoman Turks in 1915-1916. In a way, these are universally-human tragedies, on such a scale that they should never be forgotten.

Perhaps a similar monument could be raised to the people murdered in Rwanda in 1994, and the Bosnian people through the early nineties and Kosovar in the late nineties, as monuments against tribalism and fascism.

But inevitably such monuments would stir up friction between people in different communities now in Australia. Perhaps such friction would serve to highlight the fact that multiculturalism has its problems, and that a condition for moving to Australia is that people quickly learn to adopt the general values of Australians, Enlightenment values if you like, and leave some of their 'culture', their values, with their old hatreds, at the door: a new country should mean a new start.

Joe

The other side of stirring up friction, is stirring up better understanding. At Lake Victoria in western NSW, there are two memorials, side by side. One is to the Aboriginal people who died there in what is known as the Rufus River massacre in 1841, the other to the trainees of the RAAF No.2 Operational Training Unit who died there in 1941.
The massacre (originally called battle) was actually the end of several months of frontier conflict in which both Aborigines and Europeans died and are buried there. One plane and its crew were never recovered from the lake. Effectively the lake is a multiple war grave. And along the road is a memorial to Warrant Office Len Waters, the only Aboriginal pilot to serve in WW2; he had trained with the 2OTU but survived both the training (52 deaths, war cemetery in Mildura) and the war.
Personally I think these parallel memorials tell much about Australia: we fought against each other, then we fought together. Isn't this the story of the world? One minute we fight against each other, the next we're on the same side - cf Japan, Germany? Perhaps Japan could learn from Lake Victoria - that it's possible to commemorate past conflicts between peoples but still develop reconciliation and good relations? But they already know this, since the Hiroshima memorial does that too, even though the US could take exception to it.
While the events commemorated at Lake Victoria took place in Australia, is it not understandable that Australians from other backgrounds (apart from the Irish and Scots) might wish to commemorate the past tragedies of their ancestors, especially those of recent memory which in many cases led them to seek refuge in Australia. We can all learn from this; maybe the occasional friction stirred is part of the learning process.