I've decided to retire this blog — I don't really see myself updating it any time soon, and haven't for over two years anyway. I intend to leave the content on-line for the forseeable future, but have converted it to a static site. As a result, dynamic things like search and comments aren't really going to work.

You can find me on Twitter or on Google+ if you like. Alternatively, I'm usually on IRC as LawnGnome on Freenode.

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Archive for February, 2010

Electoral Disobedience

Friday, February 19th, 2010

(also known as Adam has just done something really, really dumb)

So our good friends in Tasmania have an election looming. Good for them! Democracy’s awesome.

What’s not so good for them is that free speech is also awesome, and that’s no longer available to them in the political arena courtesy of section 191 of their Electoral Act, which means that all political statements during the election campaign must be authorised. This requires a full name and address, and effectively kills anonymous discourse dead. Digital Tasmania are talking a bit more about this, if you’re interested, and there’s plenty happening to Twitter, too.

As a result, I have decided to authorise anything Tasmanians want to say on-line. I mean, I don’t really care about Tasmanian politics, so I don’t mind authorising everyone and everything.

So, if you want to say something political in Tasmania in the next few weeks but don’t want to post your full address on-line, use my magical automatic authorisation Web site and I’ll authorise whatever you have to say. Promise.

(Side note: whatever you post is trivially publicly accessible. Bear that in mind.)