The starting point of any censorship system in the Council’s submission should be that as we live in a free society adults should be free to determine what they watch
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Why do people use drugs? The question should be amplified and rephrased: what makes some young people use drugs that are officially declared dangerous and illegal in contrast to the majority who drink and smoke socially approved substances? The most obvious and natural answer is because they like them. We do not generally look for obscure, psychological or sociological explanations of most drug use in the community. People take alcohol, smoke tobacco, drink tea and coffee because they enjoy the effects of these substances
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The members of this Council do not think that there is any single way to protect civil liberties in this country. The pluralistic, open, democratic society in which we live only survives because the citizens of this country believe in it sufficiently to be active in support of it. This however does not mean that we cannot improve our institutional arrangements to ensure that they best support the continued existence of that society.
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“Commercial information is overprotected from disclosure under contemporary FOI legislation. This overprotection is evident quite apart from democratic arguments that the “public right to know” may override established commercial interest. Viewed solely in economic terms, the existing levels of protection for business information appear hard to justify. FOI legislation should be redrawn so that business information is only protected where its release will cause demonstrable harm to the competitive process itsel
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The information was created by public servants paid for by the people, answerable to a Parliament elected by the people. The information was created for us, by our employees. It’s our information. We own it. Of course we should know about it.
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Perhaps at its core privacy protects and ensures equality in the sense that we are entitled to equal concern and respect as individuals, and not that we are entitled to do as we please. Such an approach would shift away from viewing privacy as a prerequisite for preventing invasions of various liberty interests to one of maintaining conditions that will make the exercise of those liberty interests possible. So conceptualised, equality would be at the hub and the various liberty interests protected by privacy simply spokes on the privacy wheel.”
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It is actions that should be the subject of criminal sanctions not indications of support or involvement in political organisations. All of the conduct which is alleged against the organisations to be proscribed which is said to justify that proscription could be the subject of an ordinary criminal charge.
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The QCCL strongly opposes the authorisation of illegal conduct by police. The purpose of the police is to suppress criminal activity, not to encourage or create it. There is in our view no justification for any police instigation of any serious criminal conduct.
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The Queensland Council for Civil Liberties endorses the view of Mr Alan Borvoy, General Counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association that ‘Citizens in a free country should have a presumptive right to get lost. We should be able to wander around without government keeping tabs on us.’
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