Australia's leading newspapers black out front pages to protest restrictions

I nodded in agreement while reading the article with one major exception: I don’t like the idea of changing defamation law to be more journalist-friendly. Yes to more government transparency; a big no to making it even easier for the media to get away with libel.

Not far from where I once lived was a park, along two of its sides ran two busy roads which intersected at right angles and at this intersection is a set of traffic lights. The park was isolated from both roads by a high six-foot-plus fence made from grey concrete Besser blocks so every time a motorist had to stop at the lights he/she only had to look sideways to view this large swathe of concrete fencing. As anyone would know, this is the ideal place for graffiti to appear and this was no exception.

Anyway, for some 10 to 15 years, a large message remained scrawled and unaltered on the wall right near the lights—no one could miss seeing it. It read:

"The Australian people are bloody-minded sheep!"

For years as I passed it, I was always amazed at and wondered why no one had ever bothered to paint over the offensive graffiti until I eventually figured out why—which was that everyone knew or suspected that the message was true—and that the sign had remained there unaltered as a perverse reminder of the fact. Unfortunately, the park has given away to housing development so all that's now gone (and I also regret never having taken a photo of the graffiti).

This is not the place to delve deeply into the machinations of Australian society or draw parallels with 'bloody-minded sheep' except to say that largely Australians are deeply conservative by nature, intellectually shallow and very risk-averse people. They rarely riot in the streets—the last time of any note was during the anti Vietnam War demos in the late 1960s—their interest in politics only goes as deep as their hip pockets and most would prefer to gel-out at the beach, sporting fixtures or watch TV, or nowadays be numbed-out or dumbed-down by Facebook/social media.

Thus, when it comes to matters of security, all the Government has to do is to mention words like 'threat', 'terror' or security etc. and it can pass overly authoritarian laws in a moment without any debate or opposition—right, the opposition Labor Party is even more draconian about the introduction of such laws so they fly through parliament like a shot. The police and security services are onto a winner and have been so for decades.

The few of us who can actually see what's happening and are worried are so vastly outnumbered we haven't a snowball's chance of changing anything.

Frankly, it's a pretty terrible (and pathetic—even embarrassing) situation and I don't ever see it being resolved until well after the Australian 'Sheep' have realized it's too late for them to escape the boiling water.