Month: April 2002

The Australian people appear to be having a silent referendum on the Government’s digital television legislation. The vote is an overwhelming No.

The huge No vote and tiny Yes vote of about 15,000 households in the whole country appears to be making the Government crack. The Sydney Morning Herald reported this week that a Cabinet submission had been prepared recommending the present rules be changed to something sensible. All queries to the Minister’s office asking to confirm or deny were stonewalled. The Government would make an announcement in due course, the Minister, Senator Richard Alston, said.
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A dancer whose performance was described by The Canberra Times dance reviewer Michelle Potter as “”the most undancerly dance performance I have ever had to review” lost her appeal yesterday in a defamation action.

Three judges of the NSW Court of Appeal unanimously rejected her appeal against a jury verdict last year that the review was not defamatory.

The review of a dance by Vimala Sarma at Hawker College on April 30, 2000, said, “”Sarma has very little sense of rhythm in her body. Not only does she not move with the music, not frequently anyway, nor does she seem able to co-ordinate the various parts of her body so that they all move rhythmically together”.

The jury found that the imputation that Ms Sarma “”as a dancer is incompetent as a dancer performer” was conveyed by the newspaper but was not defamatory of her.
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The United States Supreme Court makes it difficult sometimes for those who argue for a Bill of Rights. This week the court ruled that the national Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 was invalid because it offended the First Amendment. The First Amendment says that Congress shall make no laws that abridge freedom of speech. It was agreed to shortly after the US came into being in 1776 is one of 10 amendments that form the US Bill of Rights.

Congress’s law prohibited virtual porn – that is images of children engaged in sexual acts created from artwork and other computer generated work that did not involve the use of live children. The Supreme Court ruled the law did not fit the usually acceptable exception to freedom of speech that protected the interests of children, because no children need be used and exploited in the production of virtual imagery. The court said that Congress could prohibit obscene material, but this law went beyond banning just the obscene; it also prohibited non-obscene expressions – for example, a film with redeeming social values that discussed the idea of child pornography. In short, Congress’s law was too sweeping.
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