# Australian Free Speech Issues

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/australian-free-speech-issues/525298>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [January 17, 2010, 7:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/australian-free-speech-issues/525298 "2010-01-17T07:24:35Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 8

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**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\
**Post date:** [February 12, 2010, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/australian-free-speech-issues/525298/141 "2010-02-12T18:17:38Z")

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[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:137, topic:525298”]

Take a look at the “location” at the upper right of the post you replied to. I live in Montana, U.S.A. Mi gobierno es tu gobierno (English translation: “my government is your government”).  
[/QUOTE]

OK - but you can introduce yourself. Not everyone has a location listed, so there is no reason to expect everyone has a habit of looking for it.

> [@](#):
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> That’s all fine and dandy, but it has nothing to do with what I said.

And what you said has nothing to do with what we are discussing then.

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> I give talks every year in schools about censorship of books (go to the American Library Association website and look at the “Banned Book Week” pages). School boards, cities, counties, and states can _and have_ banned books.

Maybe they take them out of libarires or schools, which is despicable, but it is not really “banning”. It certainly does not mean any publisher has to submit a book in advance to get permission to publish a book.

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> This is censorship by local government; it is not covered under our First Amendment because it isn’t the Federal Government.

Local governments are bound under the Constitution of the US, even in Montana 🙂

V-chip is despicable too btw, and even that does not go as far as what our Aussie correspondents are reporting.

> [@](#):
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> I never said “prior restraint.” Censorship doesn’t have to happen before-the-fact. Most of the time, in fact, it happens afterwards.

Argue if you want, but that is not the way the Aussie system is set up. It is a prior restraint system.

> [@](#):
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> You’ve set up a lovely bunch of arguments, **not\_alice** , but none of them correctly address what I said.

Perhaps you would like to address the issues on the thread then? Your positions are all fine and dandy, but if your purpose is to say that the US system is as restrictive as the Aussie system as described here, well, you have a long way to go.

If you are arguing either I or anyone else said the US system is ideal, then you are building strawmen.

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