Exit News & Forum

Senator Conroy Corrected:
Dr Nitschke wins Federal ‘Right of Reply’


Following an offensive and misleading attack on Exit international by Communications Minister Senator Conroy given at a Senate estimates hearing on 24 May, Dr Philip Nitschke was awarded a Right of Reply to correct the inaccuracy of the Minister's comments.

Of particular concern to Exit was Senator Conroy’s suggestion that data from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine implicated Exit and The Peaceful Pill eHandbook in the suicides of 14 people under 40, and that this constituted grounds for the government to include Exit International websites in the proposed ISP filter blacklist.

At the heart of Exit's complaint was Senator Conroy's decision not to highlight the clarification published in The Age newspaper by the Director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, Professor Joan Ozanne-Smith.

In a letter to the Editor, Professor Joan Ozanne-Smith wrote that most of those under 40 dying of pentobarbitone toxicity had “'knowledge of the drug and/or access to it from their work experience or workplace.”'

This deliberate omission by Senator Conroy was done to bolster the Federal Government's argument that mandatory internet censorship is needed.  In doing so, the comments were also intended to deliberately damage the reputation of Exit international and its Director Dr Philip Nitschke.

Speaking from Darwin, Dr Nitschke said 'Senator Conroy has been caught out.  He's an embarrassment to Labor and should be dumped from the Communications portfolio.'

Exit International will be supporting the “Filter Conroy” campaign planned for the forthcoming Federal election.

 

London & Dublin Exit International Chapter Meetings Scheduled.

The sessions will be hosted by Lindy Boyd from Exit and will include a half hour video link Q&A session with Dr Philip Nitschke

The presentation will include material on the latest developments in accessing, storing and using reliable end of life drugs, including recent information on sourcing powdered sodium pentabarbital in China.

Note: The Exit internaional '2010 Safe Suicide Workshop Tour' of Canada and the US and NZ dates are now available from the Exit International website:  http://www.exitinternational.net/page/Workshops

London Chapter Meeting
Friday 2 July, 10am - 12 noon

Dragon Hall
17 Stukeley St
Tube: Holborn

(morning tea will be served)



Dublin Chapter Meeting
Monday 12 July, 10am - 12 noon

Venue TBC
(morning tea will be served)
 

Dr Somogyi makes his last appeal to the Federal Police & Federal Politicians

73 year old Dr Miklos Somogyi died of prostate cancer on 21May in Bethlehem Hospital, Caufield.

At the time of his death he was paralysed from his disease and heavily sedated because of the pain.

A few days before his death he spoke to Exit International Director Dr Philip Nitschke and recorded a video message to the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, Tony Negus and to his local Federal member  Kelly O’Dywer.

In late 2009, on learning of his disease, the retired mechanical engineer sought to import the euthanasia drug Nembutal into Australia from Mexico for his own personal use. The drug was intercepted by Australian customs and seized. Dr Miklos then wrote to the Federal Police Commissioner in January asking for the drug to be released to him given his grave medical circumstances.

The AFP replied to Dr Somogyi on 22 Feb stating that they could not respond to his request and suggesting that he take the matter up with his local Member. Dr Somogyi attempted to do this by contacting the newly elected member for Higgins Kelly O’Dywer, but by this stage was too sick to take the matter further.

The video message recorded by Dr Somogyi has now been placed on YouTube and stands as a clear indictment of a harsh legal environment in Australia which ensures that people will not be able to take control of their own deaths.

Speaking from Darwin, Dr Nitschke said it had been an extremely difficult time for Miklos and his wife Erika.

“He was forced to live on when his greatest wish was for a peaceful death. Imposing this form of ‘medical care’ is not consistent with a compassionate society”.

To view Dr Miklos Somogyi’s YouTube statement:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK1yBJhLlkI

Death on the doorstep of a border community – intentional self-poisoning with veterinary pentobarbital


Clinical Toxicology
Sept 2010

F. Lee Cantrell(1),
Sean Nordt(2),
Iain Mcintyre(3), and Aaron Schneir(2)

1 California Poison Control System, San Diego, CA, USA

2 Department of Emergency Medicine, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA

3 San Diego County Medical Examiner's Office, San Diego, CA, USA


http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/15563650.2010.512562

Address correspondence to F. Lee Cantrell, California Poison Control System, 200 W. Arbor Dr. MCH 8925, San Diego, CA, USA, 92103–8925. E-mail: lcantrell@calpoison.org


Introduction. “Suicide tourism,” the practice of traveling to a foreign destination to commit suicide, has been described in the medical literature. Additionally, committing suicide by self-administering veterinary medications has been previously described. Case Descriptions. We report two successful and one unsuccessful suicide attempts involving border-town travelers utilizing self-administered veterinary pentobarbital over a 1-year period. Discussion/Conclusion. Health care practitioners should be aware of and informed about this phenomenon.
 

Obscene, Seditious and Blasphemous Books

Fortnightly Review
By Marc Trabsky
edition #14
August 26, 2010

http://fortnightlyreview.info/2010/08/26/obscene-seditious-and-blasphemous-books/

Review of the Banned Books Exhibition, Leigh Scott Gallery, First and Ground Floor, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne, 7 June to 27 August 2010.

The Banned Books Exhibition at the University of Melbourne charts the history of censorship in Australia from its modern incarnations in the early part of the twentieth century to the present day.

The display of a shrink-wrapped copy of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and a cardboard cut-out of Philip Nitschke’s and Fiona Stewart’s banned book, The Peaceful Pill Handbook reminds us that censorship is not of a bygone era. That in Australia, censorship of obscene, seditious and blasphemous books is far from over.

This exhibition not only displays a collection of banned books and magazines from the early part of the twentieth century – surprising viewers by the volume of literature that has been banned at some point in Australia – but also challenging artworks by local and international artists, as well as essays from leading academics. The most remarkable aspects of this exhibition are the sections on the Bill Henson controversy and the sections on sedition that feature amongst other artefacts the recent banning in Australia of jihadist literature.

Certainly the exhibition as a whole counters the belief that we have been liberated from the censorship of literature in the twentieth century, but it is these specific sections that implore us to question how censorship still operates today. In particular, the exhibition draws connections between the Government’s proposed plan to filter the Internet and the ‘old regime’ of twentieth century censorship.

This exhibition will thereby appeal to anyone with an interest in the history of censorship in Australia and particularly to academics, lawyers and artists.

Marc Trabsky is an MPhil Candidate in the Department of Gender and Culture Studies at The University of Sydney and a Research Assistant for the Centre for Media and Communications Law at The University of Melbourne.
 

Police find suicide contact information

Brisbane man accused of aiding suicide

AAP
Amelia Bentley
August 23, 2010

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/brisbane-man-accused-of-aiding-suicide-20100823-13fno.html

A man who allegedly helped an elderly Brisbane resident commit suicide last year is also accused of bringing into Australia a veterinary drug recommended by euthanasia advocate Dr Philip Nitschke.

Merin Nielsen, 49, of Mt Nebo, north-west of Brisbane, was arrested in February and charged with assisting the suicide of Frank Ward, a 76-year-old man found dead at his Clayfield unit in June last year.

He has also been charged with exporting or importing Sedalphorte, a border-controlled drug.

On the first day of Mr Nielsen's committal hearing in Brisbane Magistrates Court, the court was told police found Dr Nitschke's book, The Peaceful Pill Handbook, in Mr Ward's home.

An opened bottle of Sedalphorte labelled in Spanish was found next to his body.

Detective Senior Constable Grant Goodall said Mr Nielsen was the last person to see Mr Ward alive and admitted he had helped Mr Ward write a suicide note.

During the police investigation he discovered Mr Nielsen had, some time before Mr Ward's death, travelled to the USA and to Mexico, where Sedalphorte is known to be readily available.

A search of Mr Nielsen's home also found contact details for several members of pro-euthanasia group Exit International, founded and directed by Australian Dr Nitschke.

Detective Goodall said there was evidence that at least one member of Exit International had visited Mr Ward at his home prior to his death.

When contacted by police, members refused to give an official interview and a request to place the members before a Crime and Misconduct Commission star chamber where they would be forced to answer questions, was refused, Detective Goodall said.

"That was knocked on the head from a lot higher than me," he said.

The court was told a brief case full of cash and silver was also located by police during their search of his unit.

Another 20 kilograms of silver was found under a laundry sink.

The Peaceful Pill Handbook is banned in Australia.

The committal hearing, set down for five days, continues.
 

Police raid pro-euthanasia office

The Age
PAUL MILLAR
August 6, 2010
 
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/police-raid-proeuthanasia-office-20100805-11kqx.html

 
CAPTION: Pro-euthanasia campaigner and Exit International director. Photo: Nick Moir

DETECTIVES raided Exit International's Melbourne offices yesterday, sparking outrage from the pro-euthanasia group.

Police served a search warrant at the Exit International offices at Doncaster in relation to the death of a South Yarra woman on May 8.

Exit International director Philip Nitschke said the raid was uncalled for and the voluntary euthanasia group would have given police any documents they required.

Advertisement: Story continues belowDr Nitschke said the documents served were in relation to ''aiding a suicide'' and had been signed by homicide detective Senior Sergeant Ron Iddles.

The woman concerned was in her 60s and is believed to have been terminally ill.

''When a person does end their life, police feel that they need to investigate, to see if somebody has assisted,'' Dr Nitschke said.

He said it was the second time the group's Melbourne offices had been raided. Police had also been to Exit offices in New South Wales, Queensland and Darwin.

''There have never been any charges laid. We are getting a bit fed up with this,'' he said.

''This is not the first time the police have arrived at our [Melbourne] office out of the blue. The same happened in November 2009 over the suicide of another Exit member.

''The police should bear in mind, Exit is not some clandestine organisation that operates underground.''

Senior Constable Jo Stafford said police had taken great care to ensure all protocols were met yesterday and had handled the matter with as much sensitivity as possible.

''It is a sensitive issue when you are dealing with a person's medical records, but we have standard procedures to follow,'' she said.

Dr Nitschke said: ''It is totally unnecessary for the police to pounce on our office unannounced. In reality, they need only pick up the phone if they wish us to provide details about a deceased member of our organisation.''

Exit International has been connected to high-profile euthanasia cases around the world.

In 2005, police launched an investigation into its involvement with terminally ill Point Lonsdale man Steve Guest, 58, who was advised by Dr Nitschke on ways to die.

Mr Guest, who had oesophageal cancer, made a public appeal for a ''peaceful pill'' to end his suffering.

He died at his Point Lonsdale home in July 2005, from an overdose of barbiturates.

For help or information visit beyond blue.org.au, call Suicide Helpline Victoria on 1300 651 251, or Lifeline on 131 114.
 

The Works boss talks to euthanasia group

mUmBRELLA
4Aug10

http://mumbrella.com.au/the-works-boss-talks-to-euthanasia-group-30961

A powerful pro-compulsory euthanasia ad created  for The Gruen Transfer has resulted in The Works founder Kevin Macmillan being invited to speak to campaign group Exit International.


 

Exit International is the organisation founded by  “Dr Death” Philip Nitschke.

Macmillan’s talk will cover how the ad agency arrived at the creative approach shown in the Gruen spot, and the public reaction to the segment.

Macmillan will give the talk on Friday at the Sydney chapter of Exit International.

It is not the first time The Gruen Transfer has tackled controversial topics in its The Pitch segment. Adam Hunt’s controversial ad on discrimination was banned from broadcast by the ABC.

Meanwhile, tonight sees the second election-focused episode of Gruen Transfer spin-off Gruen Nation with former Liberal leader John Hewson, adman Neil Lawrence and journo Annabel Crabb joining regular panellist Todd Sampson and Russel Howcroft.

 

Dying with dignity at the Australian Science Festival


ABC Radio National
2010-08-03
Live from the National Convention Centre, Canberra

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/australiatalks/stories/2010/2964330.htm

In an ageing society, with science improving medical care, should we have the right to choose voluntary euthanasia? What about those who are not sick, but simply too tired of life to go on? And when should doctors withdraw the treatment keeping the dying alive? ABC Radio National's Paul Barclay will explore these questions in a special live Australia Talks program in collaboration with the Australian Science Festival.

On the panel for this live radio discussion will be:

• Dr Philip Nitschke, Exit International
• Professor Patrick McArdle, Australian Catholic University 
• Dr Scott Blackwell, Palliative Care Australia
• Dr Kaarin Anstey, Director of the Ageing Research Unit at  ANU
   

Taking the Assistance out of Suicide?

Dominion Post
2Aug10
Dr Philip Nitschke

Terminally ill pateints must take responsibility for thei own death
The laws of conspiracy and assistance in suicide must be clarified

CAPTION: Giving a choice: Philip Nitschke, pictured with his "suicide kit" says he has no qualms about mixing alethalsolution of drugs, but thepatient musr decide if it is to be administered inot theri veins  Photo: REUTERS

As a boy, my mother always told me that you should never ask your neighbour to do something that you wouldn’t do yourself.  I doubt she was talking about suicide, but if we had this conversation again in later life she could well be.  And I would not disagree with her.

The recent call by Auckland GP, Dr John Pollock, has brought the issue of assisted suicide back into our lounge rooms.  As the nation argues whether anyone of us deserves assistance in our dying weeks, days or hours, my long association with this issue has made me think a bit beyond the tabloid headlines.

In this respect I have recently re-titled the workshop program that I hold annually in New Zealand, Australia and around the world. 

Whereas once our workshops focused on Assisted Suicide, these days the focus is on Safe Suicide.  Information that equips the seriously ill to organize their deaths, should that nreed ever arise is my case in point.

Back on the 22 September 1986 I used my training as a doctor to help a terminally ill man to die peacefully and with dignity.  That man was prostate cancer sufferer, Bob Dent. 

Bob died in Darwin under the Northern Territory’s Rights of the Terminally Ill Act.  Three more of my patients followed in Bob’s footsteps.  All were terminally ill, of sound mind and desperate for relief from their suffering.

The ROTI Act is now long dead, pardon the pun. This ground-breaking piece of legislation lasted nine months before a vote in the Australian Federal Parliament barred the Northern Territory from making laws on voluntary euthanasia.  The law promptly ceased to operate.

Back then, however, even though that law allowed me to administer a legal, lethal, voluntary injection I did not do it.

The reasons are varied.

Firstly, I did not want to be sitting right by the patient in their final moments.  While doctors can often become confidants and even friends with their patients in the majority of cases, we are just doing our job. Call it professional distance.

On the other hand, I have always believed that the personal space of a dying person belongs to their nearest and dearest.  That is what I would want.  That is overwhelmingly what the patients also want.

Secondly, I did not want to be the person to make the final decision about when that person’s life should end.

My training at Sydney University medical school left me with important standards to uphold.  One of the most important of these is what it means to empower a patient with the knowledge necessary to make the decisions which best suit them.

As a doctor, I have never considered it my role to kill.  Under the Northern Territory’s law, however, I did consider it my duty to make the choice of voluntary euthanasia aka suicide available to those patients who qualified.

I had no qualms about inserting the canula into a patient’s arm.  I had no concerns about mixing the lethal solution of drugs which, if the patient elected, would be administered into their veins with a peaceful death following a few minutes later.

The point of the Deliverance Machine that I built to enable this process to take place made the suicide of Bob Dent safe.  To call those lawful deaths ‘assisted suicides’ is, at least to me, a misnomer.

I did not press the buttons on the laptop.  The patient did that.  The patient could equally have abstained from pressing any buttons.

The point of the Machine was that it was the patient who was taking responsibility for their life, and their death.  Not me, as their doctor.

So when a terminally ill GP calls for legislative change for doctors to be able to assist their patients to die, I do sit on the fence. 

As his doctor I would not want the responsibility of killing him. He can do that, and take the responsibility onto his own shoulders.

The claim that legislative change would allow sicker patients to live longer isn’t my experience. The sickest lucid patients can take the small drink or press the button. And we should not assume those who have passed this point, unable to make any meaningful gesture, still want help to die.

I would also support what can be the only humane response in a civil society such as ours, that the laws of conspiracy and assistance be clarified.

All dying people should have choice in who is with them in their dying days.  My own worst fear would be to die without my wife with me, holding my hand.

On this count I fully support Dr Pollock’s call for legal clarity.  What I would be more concerned about, though, is that a rational, well considered decision to terminate one’s life  one’s suicide  is not one for delegation.

Euthanasia to Soon Find its Way

TopNews.net.nz
Tangaroa Snell
Sun, 07/25/2010

http://topnews.net.nz/content/26488-euthanasia-soon-find-its-way

The debate no more is about, euthanasia and its legalization, the real debate is, if ethics are an unchangeable commandment.

There are many who call euthanasia unethical but it still persist to have public support in its favor.

While, the Conservative New Zealand Medical Association refuses to see a change John Pollock, 61 says that since the day he put forth his views that euthanasia should be legalized, his phone has been ringing ever since. People have been supporting him in his act.

Some argue that it hasn't been long since abortion too was said to be unethical.

Nelson Exit International, assert that legalizing euthanasia might contribute in prolonging the lives of people. This pro-voluntary euthanasia group consists of about 20 members from Nelson.

The members are said to meet often, to discuss the ways to take their lives. Mr. Vine says that once you reach a point when you get deliberated, then there is nothing you can voluntarily do to end your life.

There is a need for people to decide what to do, before they reach that stage.

Though, there have been cases where 2 Nelson people had taken their own lives but Mr. Vine makes it very clear that, "Exit isn't a voluntary euthanasia society which wants to change the law, and isn't a hands-on thing".

 

Euthanasia 'may prolong life for some'


The Nelson Mail
24/07/2010

http://www.stuff.co.nz/nelson-mail/news/3954696/Euthanasia-may-prolong-life-for-some


The euthanasia debate remains one of society's big issues – involving freedom and choice, individuals and families, politicians and doctors, the church and law enforcement.

BILL MOORE gives the national discussion a Nelson perspective. 

Legalising assisted suicide might have the effect of prolonging the lives of some people, Nelson Exit International spokesman Christopher Vine says.

The euthanasia debate has been reignited this week, with terminally ill Auckland GP John Pollock arguing that it should be legal for patients to make arrangements with doctors for the end of life.

Dr Pollock also said he knew many doctors who had hastened patients' deaths.

Exit International, a pro-voluntary euthanasia group, has about 20 Nelson members. Most were "hovering around the 80 mark", and they shared the view that the law should be changed, Mr Vine said.

"The common denominator is they're people that have tended to have their own way in life, rather independent people – feisty, awkward, difficult, if you like."

Members met regularly to share information about how to take their own lives, he said.

"It may seem extraordinary but it's actually quite a jolly occasion.

"If people feel empowered to do this, the dread of actually becoming, to use a rather crude word, a vegetable, is removed, and I think that's the fear of all the people in this group."

Having the power to do something to prevent that was "a matter of celebration", he said. "We always have a cup of tea and a few biscuits and a bit of a chat."

Mr Vine said the irony of the voluntary euthanasia debate was that under the existing law, people needed to act just before they reached the point where they could no longer choose for themselves.

"If you've really got to the stage of being incapacitated, you probably can't do anything about ending your life.

"If the euthanasia thing came through, it probably means that people would live a little bit longer, because they would feel that someone else could do it for them. It's actually a prolonging of life thing."

He said the two Nelson people he knew who had taken their own lives "through the Exit means" had "probably gone before they needed to, although they were close to the point of needing it".

Mr Vine said it was good to see the debate revived, but Exit was not a political lobby group. "Exit isn't a voluntary euthanasia society which wants to change the law, and isn't a hands-on thing. Exit is quite definitely devoted to the idea to find means which will enable you to end your life peacefully and quickly."

Nelson GPs' spokesman Graham Loveridge said many doctors would have knowingly prescribed medication to ease a dying patient's symptoms, in the full knowledge of the doctor, the patient and the family that it "would not help prolong and may even hasten their death".

"But I think in the majority of those cases, a sense of symptom relief and having the person comfortable and calm is the dominating intention."

Dr Loveridge said he thought that most people who worked with dying patients were comfortable with the law as it stood.

"One of the significant advances that's been made with the care of people dying is that we have many options to relieve people's symptoms.

"For many people [in] their last phase, there is a calmness to it, and a feeling of real quality. It's a chance for them to say things to their family and loved ones that might not normally be said, and it's a chance for family to gather and exhibit care and gratitude to the dying family member."

He said that from time to time, he had patients with a terminal illness "and what they want to know is that I won't let them suffer".

Nelson was well served with a good hospice service with very experienced doctors and a high level of care for the dying readily available, Dr Loveridge said.

It was good that the euthanasia debate continued in medical circles but, more importantly, in the wider community as well, he said.

"All of us of course will say, `I'd rather be dead than such-and-such', but when it comes down to it, most people find that every day is fairly precious."

Catholic Nelson GP Joseph Hassan said it was important when talking about hastening death to draw the distinction between actively killing a patient through euthanasia, withdrawing burdensome treatments, or administering palliative treatment that might hasten death.

"I am totally opposed to active euthanasia. Many doctors are, and in fact the New Zealand Medical Association is.

"There are many doctors who have been involved in palliative care management where a patient's death has been hastened through the other two possibilities, and that isn't euthanasia. It's also moral, in my view, and it's compassionate."

He said the quality of end-of-life care was very good in New Zealand, and he didn't believe a law change was warranted.

"In fact, it could be counter-productive. As it is, there's a need and a drive for increasingly excellent palliative care, and I think we're seeing the fruits of that in New Zealand.

"Euthanasia as an option may harm the progress that we're making in palliative care."

Nelson Region Hospice chief executive Pat Curry said neither the Nelson hospice nor Hospice New Zealand would enter into the debate.

She said that although the hospice dealt with patients at the end of their lives, its work was "about living, about quality of life".

About 300 terminally ill patients are treated at the Nelson hospice each year.


SOME FACTS: Section 179 of the Crimes Act states that it is an offence to incite, counsel or assist in suicide. A Massey University survey released this year showed that 45 per cent of those asked supported assisted suicide for those dependent on others for their physical needs. Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland, and about 100 British citizens have travelled there to end their lives since 1992. It is also allowed in the Netherlands and Belgium. In 1996, Australia's Northern Territory introduced a voluntary euthanasia law. Four people used the law to die by injection administered using a computer before the Australian Government in Canberra overturned the legislation in 1997.


 

Dying doctor says NZ needs to legalise euthanasia


TVNZ3
Wed, 21 Jul 2010

 
http://www.3news.co.nz/Dying-doctor-says-NZ-needs-to-legalise-euthanasia-/tabid/423/articleID/166735/Default.aspx?ArticleID=166735

A terminally-ill Auckland doctor says it is time New Zealand made the decision to legalise euthanasia.

Doctor John Pollock has been given just months to live after being diagnosed with metastic melanoma.

Mr Pollock told RadioLIVE this morning that there is overwhelming support for euthanasia in New Zealand.

“We know that most of the population actually supports it and to be quite frank, it’s just a cruel outdated law that prevents either assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia,” he says.

Prominent Australian euthanasia advocate, Philip Nitschke, otherwise known as "Doctor Death" has praised John Pollock's stance.

“The fact that the person is a doctor and would have been exposed to the worst aspects that some difficult deaths can involve and still wants to take the very courageous course of speaking publically about this – you’ve got to have a lot of courage to go down this path,” he says.

Mr Nitsche is coming to New Zealand again within the next few months, for presentations on euthanasia.

 

Censorship: Labor's hidden policy

ABC
By Nick Ross
Wed Jul 21, 2010

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/21/2960252.htm?site=thedrum

 
CAPTION: If Australia wants to vote for internet censorship then it should be made aware of all the details around it. (7pm TV News NSW)

Labor's internet filtering policy isn't being discussed in the run-up to the election but its impact on Australia is significant.

Championed by Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, the $30million+ filter is being sold by Labor as an internet block for child pornography, bestiality and extreme pornography with 'wide ranging support from the Australian public' and 'only minimal opposition against'.

But after a new, lengthy investigation it transpires that virtually none of this is true. What Australia will get from this internet filter is a framework for censorship that doesn't stop "the worst of the worst" but will absolutely curtail discussion on politically incorrect topics like euthanasia, safe drug taking and graffiti while banning relatively-tame adult content.

Below we examine the filter from the point of view of the people who know most about it, Australia's tech community, which in the past week has united in one last ditch attempt to bring Labor's censorship policy into the open and bring its discussion into the mainstream media in the run up to the election.

Support for the filter boils down to a handful of pro-censorship lobbyists claiming to be speaking for all Australians. The opposition is sizeable, informed and has put its detailed case into the open, backed with numerous polls and abundant technical information and show why the filter being touted simply won't protect anyone from child porn to virtually any degree. The following is long, but hopefully simplifies the situation enough for mainstream media and political journalists to at least question Labor (and the other political parties) about and let Australian's know that currently, "Moving Forward" under Labor brings with it censorship the like of which hasn't been seen in the Western world before.

This morning, an online poll closed with 98% of 38,000 respondents saying they would not vote for a political party that supported the internet filter. While the ALP is unlikely to be worried by a few tens of thousands of votes, the poll is significant in that it was promoted by an unprecedented alliance of almost every major technology publication and community in the country including the Sydney Morning Herald, News.com.au, PC Authority, Australian Personal Computer, PC User, PC World, Good Gear Guide, ITnews, ITWire, Delimiter, Atomic, Gizmodo, Life Hacker and the large OCAU online community. A version of it can be seen here. The only two major absentees were CBS Media (publisher of CNET and ZDNet) and the large Whirlpool online community, both of which have run similar polls with similar results in the near past.

The result underlines the fact that Australia's technology community is unequivocally against Senator Conroy's internet filter. Even if you regard this recent poll as a protest vote, with wide margins for error, it echoes the results of dozens of major previous polls before it including Whirlpool's thorough survey in 2009 (23,500+ votes, 93% against) and SMH's poll in May (69,000, 99% against). Read anyone of the above publications, and there's a history of rebellion against the filter.

Opposition also comes from pressure groups such as the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, GetUp! Australia and the Australian Sex Party, organisations like Euthanasia group Exit, plus Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook.

Conroy cites support for the filter using a McNair poll commissioned by the ABC's Hungry Beast. The poll found 80% of respondents would be in favour of an internet filter that cut out Refused Classification (RC) content. However, the poll invoked large criticism for not properly explaining what RC content was. McNair summarised RC as being, "Images and information about one or more of the following: child sex abuse; bestiality; sexual violence; gratuitous, exploitative or offensive sexual fetishes; and detailed instructions on or promotion of crime, violence or use of illegal drugs". No mention was made of content being blocked for being politically incorrect. Conroy later told Four Corners that this poll demonstrated how, "the Australian public overwhelmingly believe that Refused Classification is a reasonable classification. They demonstrated that in a reputable poll". No it didn't.

But by focusing on the less contentious aspects of RC content, is it any wonder they were in favour of it? If the same respondents knew how much it was costing, that it wouldn't and couldn't work along with what else was being censored, it's likely the result would swing the other way. In May the Safer Internet Group commissioned a poll by GA Research which discovered, as the Sydney Morning Herald put it, "That the more parents found out about the proposed filter, the less they support it". The problem is that almost every pro-filter poll has been presented with a question along the lines of, "Would you like a filter which blocks child porn?". What it also shows is that if a major pollster like McNair can't get a handle on the filter, what hope is there for mainstream media? While we're certain the whole of Australia would love a filter that banished child pornography, this is the last thing that the proposed filter will do.

The filter works by having Internet Service Providers, like BigPond, iiNet and Internode, block specific web page addresses on a blacklist. However, it is facile to circumvent in just seconds by using completely legal services like 'proxy servers' and 'Virtual Private Networks' which are regularly used by corporate employees working from home. Getting round the blacklist at the publisher's end is simple too. Recently, tech site, Gizmodo showed how a blocked page could effectively get off the blacklist by adding a question mark to the end of the web address thereby changing the address enough to make it different. If that subsequent web address was then blocked then any number of meaningless combinations of letters and numbers could be added to the end of the address to avoid blocking too. Internet Industry Association CEO Peter Coroneos summed the situation up to ITnews, "While we support many of the Government's efforts in the online security sphere, we aren't convinced that it [the filter] will have anything more than symbolic value".

The only people who won't be able to readily circumvent the filter are the general public that aren't specifically looking for the blocked content in the first place. What these people will find is that if they ever go looking for detailed information on euthanasia or safe drug taking and in some instances, mild pornography, they won't be able to find it without seeking help on circumventing the filter.

In addition to ease of circumvention the filter is diverting attention and resources to the wrong place. The internet is made up of various elements: the World Wide Web's web pages are just one part (the shop window) of the greater internet. There are also vast information stores called newsgroups, plus Virtual Private Networks, chat rooms, internet messaging services and email which act like back rooms and alleyways. This is the natural domain for criminals and the really offensive material. If you're going to commit a crime it's unlikely to be in the shop window. Those child porn sites that are on the web move around very quickly too - you can read more on this here.

Senator Conroy recently stated that, "No responsible government can sit there and do nothing if there's 355 child abuse websites on the public internet." However, the 'public internet' consists of more than one trillion individual web pages rendering any attempts at blocking all of the 'bad' sites futile. Hypothetically, a team of 100 censorship engineers investigating 1000 pages every day each would take over 27,000 years to investigate what's online today, and in that time countless other pages would have appeared. Any filter couldn't ever be considered remotely complete and any public faith that the filter will in some way protect them is entirely unfounded.

Establishing whether the public need protecting in the first place is a tricky matter. Running a poll asking people if they had ever seen any child pornography is unlikely to provide reliable results with few people wanting to say yes to such a question under any circumstances. We can only go on anecdotal evidence here. Personally I've used the internet practically every day since the beginning of the World Wide Web and I've seen just about every disgusting thing there is to see, but I've never once seen child pornography or necrophilia. Discussion with online communities suggests that this experience is universal. Only one person I know has said they'd seen something terrible involving children and that came from following a false music-related link which directed them to one such site. They called the police. At present no one has provided statistics or any evidence saying that accidentally accessing these sites is a problem that actually exists.

Another issue is that the internet is global and Australia's broad RC guidelines are at odds to mainstream media coming out of other countries. Decapitated hostages, people dying in accidents and crime scene pictures are not just widely available all over the web, but many come from reputable news sources and even prime time news shows in regions like Eastern Europe, The Middle East and South America. In Amsterdam's Sex Museum there is a restricted section which warns sensitive people that what they are about to see is not for the squeamish. In it there are numerous photographs of women having sex with various animals. The Sex Museum is listed as a major tourist attraction in most guides to Amsterdam and is frequently mentioned by Australian tourism publications as being one the main things to see when in Amsterdam. While few Australians are likely to want to see such content in their mainstream media, anti-censorship bodies and groups caught up in RC classification are adamant that it's up to the individual to decide for themselves and not the government what they see online. The government routinely counters that it's the classification board that decides, but the board does not do what the government says it does and the government is the body that's empowering it.

At the sharp end of the argument is the international Euthanasia group, Exit. A recent episode of Four Corners detailed how groups of pensioners were attending nationwide courses which literally taught them how to hack the filter in order to access (at least the key elements of) euthanasia information sites like, peacefulpillhandbook.com which would be blocked by the filter. The full transcript can be read here. Senator Conroy insists, "Individual pages are targeted. Websites are not. This common argument that the euthanasia websites will be targeted and banned is just false. If there is a detailed instruction in self-harm, yes, that page would be targeted but the website and the discussion around euthanasia would not. So for those who keep trying to make this argument, they're simply misleading Australians." Host Quentin McDermott countered that, "In fact, the entire online version of the Peaceful Pill Handbook and related videos will be blocked if a mandatory filter is introduced." And summed up by saying, "The spectacle of elderly folk finding ways to bypass a filter intended to protect children online begs the question - how on earth did we get to this point?"

Much has been made about whether the list should be made public or not. But the question is pointless. It will go public whether by whistle blowing or a simple process of reverse engineering (the latter having been promised by online entities already). Whether anyone should reverse engineer and publish it is irrelevant. That's what happens on the internet and anyone who is adamant that it won't simply doesn't understand the internet. The internet has very many people who value their privacy to extreme degrees and will rebel against any government censorship action just out of principle - whether it's their own government or not. Already, in March 2009, an early version of the blacklist appeared on award-winning whistleblowing website Wikileaks.org which notably released videos of US Army "collateral damage" incidents given to it by anonymous whistleblowers. The videos showed civilians and journalists being killed by the US Army. Wikileaks itself was named on the blacklist. The list was reported on around the world with some Australian journalists investigating the sites on it citing journalistic duty. In this regard the filter was counterproductive in that it acted as a web directory for some of the most heinous websites on the internet. One can't imagine that with the global exposure that the story got, many people, including children, didn't visit the site out of morbid curiosity or whatever reason. Even if Australian kids did find it harder to access child pornography and RC content because of the filter, to the same degree, kids in other countries will find it more easily thanks to an Australian government sponsored directory of websites that wasn't otherwise available before.

Although Senator Conroy plays down the impact of the filter, saying that determined people can get around it if they really want to, critics are concerned that Conroy's non-policing of filter circumvention will not be mirrored by future governments who may also broaden the scope of the censorship it affords. He told Four Corners, that he "absolutely guaranteed" that no future Labor government would let this happen and subsequently that "If a majority of the Parliament in the future want to broaden the classification, well then, Australians should stand up and say 'just a minute', and I'll be one of them." We contacted Conroy's office to ask how the Senator guaranteed this would not happen but the question was not answered. The notion that all future Australian governments will be formed by Labor is optimistic of Conroy to say the least. That future governments, intent on censorship (probably under banners of "child protection" and "terrorism"), would listen to people "standing up and saying 'just a minute'" is more optimistic yet, given the contempt Conroy himself has shown to all the people disagreeing with him.

While many tens of thousands of Australians are demonstrably against the filter, finding communities that actively support it is somewhat harder. While Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard have both stated they support the Senator and his filter, they haven't addressed any of its points or said why. In the face of all the communities and community leaders against the filter, the same few names keep coming out in support of it, principally Child Wise CEO Bernadette McMenamin, the Australian Christian Lobby's Jim Wallace and Professor Clive Hamilton of Charles Sturt University.

At the Media Connect conference of Australian technology journalists in 2008 McMenamin addressed the conference stating that "she did not understand the technical side of the filter" but that "she supported it anyway". After weathering criticism from the attending journalists she stated that only child molesters could protest against the filter - something that mortally offended everyone attending, especially the parents in the room. Her response to the subsequent backlash was, "won't someone please think of the children". When McMenamin published her views in The Australian newspaper in January 2008, they drew similar criticism. Journalist, Blogger and ABC Unleashed contributor, Stilgherrian commented at the time, "The fact that Ms McMenamin is willing to hand the government a comprehensive online censorship mechanism while chasing this chimera of a Magick Filter only shows how naive her understanding of the Internet is, and how her passion has clouded her understanding of the bigger picture."

McMenamin is not alone. Senator Conroy recently recommitted himself to the filter by saying, "I'm not into opting in to child porn" in response to Labor Senator Kate Lundy and Greens Senator Scott Ludlam's speeches against it. If they're right, and the only people who protest against the filter are child molesters, then it's a good job Australia is separated from the rest of the world by so much ocean. The implication that the other Senators were opting into child porn was not covered by mainstream media.

The Christian Lobby's Jim Wallace told Four Corners that he found it "quite amazing" that anyone would oppose the filter plans. He told Quentin McDermott of his unabashed censorship ideals, "The bigger principle here is to establish the principle that the internet is not a free zone and I think that given the movement of technology and given the expectation of society that what the Government is proposing is therefore a good solution." He also stated, "We've lobbied the Government of course and we've lobbied quite hard. We got the first commitment to this prior to the last election and you know we're happy to see that the Government is delivering on it."

Professor Hamilton, a reputed academic, is the calming face of the learned pro-censorship movement. He told Four Corners, "that [his group] commissioned a poll which showed that parents of teenage children are extremely concerned about their children's access to porn on the Internet and when we asked them explicitly whether they would support a mandatory filter on Internet service providers to prevent extreme and violent pornography coming into the home an astonishing 93 per cent said yes they would support that. I mean that's almost unheard of in any survey such a resounding almost unanimous view." He went on to say, "We now we have this strange alliance in support of Internet filtering ... Christian conservatives, along with feminists, social progressives such as myself and a vast number of parents and ordinary punters out there. That's how politics works."

And it's these claims which sum up the filter's supporters. The lobbyists are playing politics and claiming ownership of anyone who hasn't overtly come out against the filter - the great unspoken majority: those that don't actually know what the filter will and will not do. While Hamilton may have polls to back up his claims, there are many more from the anti-filter side and those ones come with detailed explanations on why they are the way they are, joined most of the time by thousands of comments from concerned Australians. All the arguments are open and in the public domain and can be easily accessed by a quick Google search. The pro-filter side is conveniently hidden but we're assured it's there. Get used to that if the filter comes to pass.

Certainly the anti-filter movement has lost out to the political skills of the lobbyists thus far as testified by the failure to bring the censorship issue into the open. The less debate there is, the more likely the pro-filter movement will succeed in its aims. It's an uphill battle though ... compare the length of this article with the pro-filter's "Shall we ban child porn?" brevity. That doesn't make it right though. As for why the ALP is even bothering to continue with such an unpopular policy when it needs all the support it can get, that almost certainly comes down to politics too: ironically, another policy backflip would almost certainly be leapt on by mainstream media and cost Labor the election. So we're likely stuck with censorship unless things change drastically.

Conroy goes to great lengths to point out that this is not a government run filter, but that it will be run by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) which comes under the Attorney General's department. RC is decided by ACMA's Classification Board and uses broad guidelines with regards to what to censor. Sites will only be banned if a complaint is received specifically about them and it falls under RC guidelines - music to the ears of ultra-conservative groups. The board refused to comment on the specific matters we asked about, but then that's how it operates. Everything is dealt with on a case by case basis. Its own history records conflicting classifications, with some media being both banned and classified for the same thing. There are no hard and fast rules.

But while the Classification Board won't disclose exactly what will and will not be refused classification, we did talk to people on the bleeding edge of the rulings: sex shop owners and adult publishers. Their opinion was unanimous: the RC rules were impossibly broad and grey which left them with no choice but to err on the side of caution in order to guarantee classification. Sex shop owners felt they were being forced out of business as they weren't allowed to sell books, magazines and DVDs with content that was widely available on the internet.

This all flies in the face of Senator Conroy's assertions that "only the worst of the worst will be banned". If you take your definition of mild pornography from what's available online, you'll find what's available in the sex shops - what has been classified acceptable - as positively prudish. We got hold of a document used by an adult publisher which explicitly detailed what should be submitted for classification and what should not on the grounds that similar content has been banned before and will likely be banned again. It details how girls having a play fight, giggling with plastic swords, represented sexual violence and would be classified RC. Also, any images of bondage of any kind with any woman or man being playfully tied up or in any restraints whatsoever would be refused classification. All Sado Masochistic practices, all domination would be refused classification too. We asked the classification board to verify the claims in the document, but it refused. Any Australians that are into these practices should know that although the classification guidelines lead with, "Adults should be able to read, hear and see what they want", your choices are officially, "revolting or abhorrent phenomena ... that offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults". The full guidelines can be seen here.

Elsewhere, the board has come under fire for refusing classification to pictures of women with small breasts on the grounds they look like children - something that has outraged women's groups for stigmatising women who don't have large breasts. Also videos featuring the natural act of female ejaculation on the (erroneous) grounds that it is in fact an obscene "golden shower" have also been classified RC.

Senator Conroy's office laughed off the suggestion that small breasts and female ejaculation would be banned and the classification board also denied doing so either. However, evidence exists to show that both have been classified RC in Australia. According to Australian Sex Party founder Fiona Patten, at an ACMA publications training day being run by Classification Education Officer Antonny Ivancic and four other officers last October, in "one of the slides the reason the RC was given [was because] the woman had under developed breasts and this made her appear under 18. The image was of a woman outside by a pool. There were no pigtails, fluffy toys or anything else in the image that would have you believe that the publisher was trying to portray her as a minor. There was some discussion around the room about this decision. Other images that had been refused classification mentioned the body of the model but also the way that she photographed". As for female ejaculation, films containing it have indeed been banned - Classification Number 237341 is one such example. It all makes a mockery of Conroy's "worst of the worst claims" and he has demonstrated that he doesn't actually know what is being banned by the board he is entrusting so much power to.

To make matters more confusing, different States deal with classification in different ways. At present RC material is only illegal in Western Australia. Conversely X18+ material is only available on sale in ACT and Northern Territory. Consequently, depending on where you are, you may get fined or sent to jail for selling material classified legal by the Federal government. With pornography being added to Australian landing cards last September (to no media furore whatsoever), all visitors coming to Australia with pornography on their laptops or phones, must now declare it, have it screened by customs and hope that it isn't deemed RC as they can be fined, refused entry or jailed depending on what they have. Barely any mention has been made of this in the Australian and international media - surprising considering the attention given to the landing cards dealings with drugs and quarantine. The Australian Sex Party's Fiona Patten told us you can "Risk five year jail terms for bringing in more than 25 copies of an RC film under the new Tier One Customs regulations" which a sex shop owner (or tourist) can do if they inadvertently import anything deemed RC. Furthermore, in April this year, New South Wales man Darrell Cohen, a gay 23-year old sex shop owner was sent to prison for, as Patten states, "Selling 45 Federally classified X-rated films and five RC films ... gay mild ... stuff, nothing with animals or anything. First time in the western world that someone has gone to jail for selling a federal government approved film ... It's just unbelievable that in 2010 when you can get all manner of perversity on the internet, and when Conroy has specifically said the filter will not target X-rated material because it's 'legal' that a young man can go to jail for selling same."

While the full scope of RC guidelines goes beyond this article, it's clear that it's all but impossible to predict much of what will be filtered and what won't be. Perhaps this really did get through to the Senator lately as he recently announced a one year delay to the filter while the RC system was reorganised. Tony Abbott too was recently quoted by Kotaku as saying the system was "broken". It will still provide the basis of a future Labor filter though. It will still censor politically incorrect sites.

The filter did not become law under the current government but earlier this year the Senator reminded us that "We took our filtering proposal to the Australian public and we were elected on it." If this comes as news to you, bear in mind that this is exactly what will happen in one year's time. That it is not being mentioned by a mainstream media, in full election mode, is a disservice to Australia. If Australia wants to vote for censorship then it should be made aware of all the details around it. It should not just accept that the filter will protect the Australian public from things like child porn when it categorically will not. Opposition to it is near total among the communities that actually understand what is happening (Australia's tech community for one) and recognise the devil in the detail. Ultimately, those that know about this filter are against it. Those who don't are having their opinion hijacked by a few pro-censorship lobbyists and politicians. Australia is free to vote for censorship if it wants, but it must go into this election informed and with its eyes open. Australia's media has a moral and professional obligation to ensure that it does so and so far it has failed. It's not too late, but the time has come to ask the pollies, "Do you support censorship?"

Nick Ross is the ABC's new technology and games editor.
 

Misuse of drug claim
 
TUE 20 JUL 2010,
NT News
By NICK CALACOURAS


UNIVERSITY staff members are being investigated for allegedly misusing a euthanasia drug.

The Northern Territory News understands the Veterinary Board is investigating two members of Charles Darwin University's rural training operations for misusing the drug sodium pentobarbital, which is commonly used by vets to euthanise animals.

The strong barbiturate is dubbed ``the Green Dream'' thanks to its bright green colour.

Because of its ability to cause full anaesthesia and shut down the respiratory system, the drug can only be administered by a qualified vet.

But the NT News understands a non-qualified university employee was told to administer the drug and kill the animal instead.

Department of Resources spokesman Matthew Henger said the Veterinary Board would not comment on the matter -- or even confirm or deny if the university was under investigation.
He said the board may also choose not to make the findings public at the end of the investigation.

CDU vice-chancellor Barney Glover said the university would not comment on the matter until the investigation was completed. It is expected to last four weeks.
 

YouTube tribute to the right-to-die movement

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0ES9dv5d4E

This video is in tribute to the right-to-die movement, and in tribute to the Final Exit Network. The music is titled "The Final Right Of Death" by Chris of SolestiaGoaTrance/NightsAmore, who has a YouTube channel here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/SolestiaGoaTrance


The following names are of the people whom appeared in the images presented in this video :

Dr. Jack Kevorkian
Craig Ewert (who spoke at certain moments during the song)
Ludwig Minelli
Dr. Philip Nitschke
Terry Pratchett
Debbie Purdy (with her husband)
Edward Downes and Joan Downes
Dr. Larry Egbert
Ted Goodwin
Jerry Dincin
Derek Humphry

 

Filter delay: backtracking or backburning?

ABC The Drum
9Jul10
Stilgherrian

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2949742.htm

 
Friday's announcement about mandatory internet filtering is just what the Government needed: a way to get this toxic issue out of play before the federal election.

Even better, it gives everyone a chance to feel like they've achieved a minor victory - even though the policy hasn't actually changed.

The announcement by Senator Stephen Conroy, the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, has two threads.

The first is the Outcome of consultations on transparency and accountability for ISP filtering, which creates a new framework for assessing complaints from the public about internet content and compiling the list of Refused Classification (RC) material that the planned filter would block.

Complaints to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) will now be assessed by the Classification Board, a body with far more expertise in assessing content in relation to the National Classification Scheme and community standards. Content owners will now be notified, not the hosting provider. There will be an avenue for appeal, and an annual review of the entire list.

Inasmuch as a secret blacklist could ever be compiled transparently, this could do the job - although personally I'll reserve judgment until I've seen the draft legislation. All this represents the kind of bureaucratic improvement that the filter would require.

It's the second thread that's the biggie: a comprehensive review of what constitutes RC material. And not before time.

Despite Senator Conroy's regularly-repeated mantra of RC as "including child sex abuse content, bestiality, sexual violence including rape and the detailed instruction of crime or drug use", it covers a lot more than that. The concerns have been that the definition of RC is inconsistent and doesn't reflect current community standards.

Actually, there isn't a clear definition of RC at all.

As long-time censorship watcher Irene Graham has documented at Libertus.net, there's no definitive list in legislation, nor in documents issued by the Classification Boards or the Classification Policy Branch of the Federal Attorney-General's Department.

Instead, RC exists only as a set of broad but inconsistent guidelines that have been cobbled together by the censorship ministers, often without reference to parliament, and usually without reference to the research on "community standards".

RC has ended up including material that might not be to everyone's tastes but certainly isn't "the worst of the worst", to use Conroy's phrase.

The movie 70K, for instance, about the Melbourne-based graffiti crew of the same name, was refused classification because "it deals with crime (the defacement of public property) in such a way that it offends against the standards of propriety generally acceptable to reasonable adults".

The Peaceful Pill Handbook by Dr Phillip Nitschke and Dr Fiona Stewart begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting was refused classification - not as is commonly believed because it promotes euthanasia, but because "it instructs in the crime of the manufacture of barbiturates". Just like any decent pharmaceutical textbook.

Any depiction of any sexual activity involving any fetish, however mild - such as candle wax or a bit of dressing up in leather - is automatically refused classification. The history of that concept is the laughable history of RC in microcosm.

The review of Refused Classification is expected to take a year. Mandatory internet filtering won't be introduced until it's finished. Meanwhile, some internet service providers will voluntarily block a blacklist of child abuse material - but not the rest of the contentious RC category. With Telstra, Optus and Primus already signed on, that covers 70 per cent of the internet-using population.

And thus everyone gets to feel like they've won something, at least on the surface.

For conservative Christians such as the Australian Christian Lobby, the censorship policy they've been pushing for is still on the table. Though mandatory filtering has been delayed another year, voluntary filtering will at least "protect" a majority of Australians from some of the nasties. It's a start.

Meanwhile they'll have plenty of time to marshall their not inconsiderable lobbying resources into trying to extend the definition of RC.

For opponents of internet filtering, the delay means at least a temporary reprieve from a policy they hate. Voluntary filtering is restricted to child abuse material, the blocking of which is presumably non-controversial. Even if it is, they can choose an ISP that delivers an unfiltered internet.

Again, they'll have a chance to lobby for a definition of RC that better reflects their view of current community standards. Their challenge will be lobbying with as much discipline and consistency of message as their conservative Christian opponents.

For those who don't care either way - the majority of the population, by my reckoning - this confusing issue might just disappear from the media for a while. Blessed relief.

For the vendors of internet censorship equipment, well, they don't care whether internet filtering is mandatory or voluntary, they've still got a market for their magic boxes.

Whether Senator Conroy's strategy succeeds in removing internet censorship as an election issue remains to be seen.

The chatter on Twitter this afternoon would indicate that many of the anti-filter spokespeople have already noticed that nothing has, in fact, changed. They can still portray the ALP as the party that censors.

Opposition spokesperson Senator Tony Smith has labelled it a "humiliating backdown", but has yet to declare what they'd do instead. Could they still pick up votes by letting the punters assume they wouldn't have a similar policy?

Stilgherrian is an opinionated and irreverent writer, broadcaster and consultant based in Sydney, Australia.
 

Sex Party hopes classification review relaxes guidelines

ABC News, PM
By Simon Lauder and staff
Fri Jul 9, 2010 

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/09/2949844.htm
 
CAPTION: Some of the grey areas of internet censorship include sexual fetishes. (ABC News: Damien Larkins, file photo)

The Australian Sex Party is hoping a review into national online classification guidelines will legalise some types of pornography which are currently banned.

Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy today announced an independent review of the policy of what constitutes "refused classification" rated content when he delayed the introduction of a mandatory internet filtering program.

He says the review, to take up to a year, has nothing to do with criticism of the proposal from the likes of Google and the US government.

Under current guidelines anything that is so abhorrent that it offends the standards of decency and morality of a reasonable adult is refused classification.

That includes child abuse material, bestiality, sexual violence, detailed instruction in crime or drug use and incitement of a terrorist act.

Some of the grey areas of internet censorship include images of crimes taking place, graffiti or stencil art and sexual fetishes.

Spokesman for the Australian Sex Party, Robbie Swan, is in favour of sexual fetish material becoming available online.

"Bondage material is consenting. People say that they want to be spanked on the bottom, so it's consenting," he said.

"But under the guidelines at the moment the RC [refused classification] material says that it's a form of violence which is a bit silly really."

But he is unsure whether he will see such material becoming legalised any time soon.

"I don't know that that would be the case," he said.

"I would hope that in fact consenting fetishes would become legal under this. But I can't see Senator Conroy agreeing to that."

Current guidelines were originally written for publications, film and computer games.


freedom of speech

Irene Graham, who has been running a website about Australian censorship laws since the 1990s, says those guidelines have no place online.

"The internet is not a media. It's a communication system and we don't have classifications applying to our telephone conversations or letters we sent or faxes we sent," she said.

"Why should it apply to material on a web page that you're accessing in your own home?"

But the guidelines are already used to assess material on Australian websites and after they are reviewed, they will be used to determine which overseas websites will be blocked.

Ms Graham says the rule against inciting crimes and drug use can be applied much more broadly to material on the internet and the guidelines need to be tweaked to make sure they do not stomp on freedom speech.

Prominent euthanasia campaigner Dr Philip Nitschke had his book about euthanasia refused classification on review. He is concerned that websites which claim to promote harm minimisation may be banned.

"This important topic is the instruction in the information about safe drug use, for example. The idea that that should be prevented so that people can't learn how to safely use drugs, I think is something which I find quite unacceptable," he said.

People who are familiar with Australia's censorship regime are predicting a long delay because any change to classification guidelines requires all Australia's Attorneys General to agree.

It is an arrangement which has already frustrated fans of violent or raunchy video games who have been campaigning for several years to be able to play them.

Any computer game which does not rate MA+ or less is banned in Australia, which raises the prospect of the internet filter blocking access to what would otherwise be mainstream fare for gamers.

Senator Conroy says internet service providers Telstra, Optus and Primus have agreed to block websites known to contain child pornography in the meantime.
 

Censorship and sensibility


Author: Jane Sullivan
Date: 10/07/2010
The Age

http://bit.ly/assJVQ
 
Jane Sullivan probes the sometimes secret history of book banning in Australia.

IN 1946, Australian writer Robert Close found himself on trial in the Victorian Supreme Court for writing a novel, Love Me Sailor. As Close's obituary in The Independent stated, it was one of the most extraordinary cases of the 20th century, up there with the better-known Lady Chatterley's Lover trial.

Close was charged with the rare offence of obscene libel. He had the support of his publisher, Georgian House; leftist literati; and praise from no less a luminary than the American author Henry Miller. But after three trials, Close was found guilty, the book was banned, and the author was fined and led away in handcuffs to a Black Maria (police van), to serve three months in jail.

In the end, Close served only 10 days. On his release, he left Australia for Europe and did not return for 25 years. Love Me Sailor sold well enough overseas for him to buy a six-tonne cutter and live in Cannes.

Before his death in 1995, he wrote several more novels and was compared with Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. But in his 1977 autobiography Of Salt and Earth, Close still wrote with bitterness about his conviction and sentence, which he said arose from the Australian authorities' paranoia about leftist writers.

Judge Sir Edmund Herring, who refused Close bail in the first trial, had never heard of James Joyce, whose book Ulysses was on sale in the same shop. (Ulysses had also been banned in Australia.) Judge Martin, who convicted Close, told him: "You have made a gross assault on the morals of the community."

What was this "gross assault"? Nicole Moore, Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales Australian Defence Force Academy, says Love Me Sailor mentions brothels, prostitutes and "hints of erections". It's set on a merchant navy ship where a female passenger joins the all-male crew: "The men all go mad and she goes mad, too  it's a great melodrama."

Professor Jenny Hocking, biographer of Frank Hardy, says the Close case is one of several postwar cases in Australia where artists and literary figures (including Hardy and Max Harris) were prosecuted under criminal or obscene libel laws for their work. "They were terrible examples of the use of obscure and archaic law to impose a form of political repression, with a chilling effect beyond the immediate subject," she says.

"One of the great dangers of the use of law is that it will create an environment of cultural timidity and aesthetic restraint that's unhealthy for society. And that remains the case today."

Professor Hocking, Head of the School of Journalism and Australian Studies at Monash University, is a keynote speaker and Moore is a guest at a Melbourne conference next week on the theme: "To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books."

The Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand's 2010 conference, organised by the Centre for the Book at Monash University, will look at the long and varied history of attempts to ban, suppress or hide books  from 18th century erotica to 20th century horror comics and Frank Hardy's Power Without Glory. And in an age when the text of supposedly banned books can be posted and accessed on the internet, it asks: "Can any book remain hidden for long?"

FOR much of the 20th century, Australia had the dubious distinction of being one of the most zealous censors of books among Western democracies. Modelled on the censorship of Catholic Ireland, its policy took pride in being far more severe than that of Britain, India or the United States. The Department of Customs and Trade intercepted books at point of entry and confiscated them.

Much of this censorship was done in secrecy, with no list of banned books available until 1958, Moore says. "Before that, Customs took strong measures to make sure the public didn't know what was banned . . . even booksellers didn't know."

For the past six years, Moore and others have been creating a bibliography of banned books, sifting through "literally mountainous" Customs' records.

Official estimates cite 5000 banned titles, but Moore reckons that with magazines and pamphlets and other ephemera, the list could reach 17,000. Banned books included Ulysses; Brave New World; two George Orwell novels (Down and Out in Paris and London and Keep the Aspidistra Flying); Portnoy's Complaint; Lolita and Lady Chatterley's Lover (banned for five years longer than in Britain). Australia also banned popular fiction such as Forever Amber and 21 Mickey Spillane novels.

There was a huge scandal when a copy of Catcher in the Rye was found in the Parliamentary library in 1957 and it was removed. It had been banned for six years in Australia but was already a set book in US universities.

Books were banned or censored for many reasons, including depicting homosexual or heterosexual acts, and "blasphemy, offence of the monarchy, advocacy of communism, irreverence to religion, advocacy of witchcraft, advocacy of single-parent childbearing, the belittling or denigration of the armed forces", according to Peter Coleman's 1962 book, Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition: Censorship in Australia. Nicole Moore says books advocating birth control were banned in the 1930s and '40s, even though birth control was not illegal.

But following writers' protests in the '60s and '70s, public sentiment changed, and in 1973 the Whitlam government abolished censorship of the printed word, films and plays. Instead, books were issued or refused a certificate through the Office of Film and Literature Classification. Later, the Howard government transferred this task to the Attorney-General's department.

It was a time of much more liberal attitudes and books on all subjects were more freely available. But in recent years, there has again been some tightening of the rules, mainly because of government responses to perceived threats of terrorism.

In the past few years we have seen the first banning of books in Australia since 1973. These include two allegedly "jihadist" books, Defence of the Muslim Lands and Join the Caravan, which in 2004 were banned from the University of Melbourne so that not even academic researchers in terrorism were allowed to access them; and The Peaceful Pill Handbook, which gives instructions in euthanasia and is available in other countries.

Paradoxically, the contents of these books are available on the internet. The Peaceful Pill Handbook website offers 24 months of updates for a fee, with a note that downloading the book may be illegal in Australia. If Senator Stephen Conroy's proposed internet filter legislation goes through, the books will no longer be available online, but computer-savvy people may still be able to access them and euthanasia groups are teaching seniors how to evade the filter.

Author Frank Moorhouse read the banned "jihadist" books online when writing his award-winning 2006 essay The Writer in the Time of Terror, which documents his concern that censorship is creeping back and examines what this means for society. "Our experience with censorship is that it creeps as the censorship bureaucracy grows and finds work for itself by seizing on moral panic or public anxiety as an excuse," he writes. "This, more than ever, is a danger because of the growth of the security and espionage bureaucracy."

Today, the debate about censorship has become very complex, says Dr Simone Murray, director of the Centre for the Book. The old laws that backed up censorship were based on the idea of territoriality and the idea of the book as a physical object. But with the arrival of the internet, that old link has been cut, and it has become much harder to ban the content of books, if not the physical form.

The conference will also look at more subtle forms of restriction, such as copyright holders preventing internet access to books; or "market censorship", a term devised by Andre Schiffrin in his 2000 book The Business of Books. Schiffrin argues that now the book industry is dominated by multinationals and their obsession with profits, the culture has become extremely conservative because nobody wants to risk capital with a new kind of book.

For the time being, Frank Moorhouse writes, we will live in two worlds: an older one where material can be banned; and with the internet, where anything can be found. Meanwhile, the government will be as much at war with its citizens as it is with the terrorists: "As ever, writers, journalists, songwriters, satirists, comedians and citizens will speak their minds and break the restrictive laws as they see fit. The government will probably have to send some of us to jail."

If Moorhouse is right, Robert Close might be the first but not the last Australian to be led off in handcuffs for writing a book.

arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/conferences/deprave-and-corrupt/

Two conference events are open to the public and free. Professor Jenny Hocking will speak on "Angela Wren's Lost Watch: Power Without Glory, Criminal Libel and Hidden Histories" at 4pm on July 15. Kevin Patrick will speak on "A Design for Depravity: Horror Comics and the Challenge of Censorship in Australia, 1950-1986" at 7pm on July 16. Both events will be held at the Wheeler Centre Auditorium. Bookings: wheelercentre.com


On the banned wagon . . .

The Butcher's Shop The first Australian novel to be banned, in 1929, was by Jean Devanny, a fiery communist and feminist campaigner who was also a prolific author of romance fiction. It was branded "disgusting, indecent, communistic". "Many of her books appeared to be romances but had a very serious feminist content," says Nicole Moore, Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales Australian Defence Force Academy. The heroine declares it is her right to be in love with her husband and also to have an affair with his best friend: it is an argument against monogamy and the double standard. Another banned Devanny novel, The Virtuous Courtesan, featured arguably Australia's first "out" homosexual characters.

Power Without Glory In 1951, Frank Hardy was charged with criminal libel by Ellen Wren, allegedly because his explosive political novel depicted her as the mother of an illegitimate child. But the case was really designed to suppress the fictionalised story of Ellen's husband, the controversial politician John Wren. If convicted, Hardy could have been sentenced to up to 20 years in jail. But his defence was that he was writing fiction, and he was acquitted. The novel became an Australian classic.

Phantastique, an Australian horror comic book drawn in 1986, ran for four issues, was banned in three states and then discontinued. "It included scenes of rape, violence and dismemberment, like the R-rated splatter movies of the time," says Kevin Patrick, writer and comic enthusiast, and a speaker at the To Deprave and Corrupt conference. "The Reverend Fred Nile denounced it in the New South Wales Parliament. It was also viewed with disfavour because it had received a government grant for small business development."

Patrick believes Australian comic publishers exercised self-censorship in the '50s, the boom time for US horror comics with graphic covers. As with current campaigns against video games, there was a strong move to restrict sales of comics aimed at minors.

Today, parental anxiety focuses on the Japanese mangas, with their sexual or violent images of females drawn in an infantilised style: are they adult women or little girls?

Letty Fox: Her Luck Australia was the only country to ban this 1946 novel by one of our premier writers, Christina Stead. Set in New York, it featured lesbian characters, a woman who has an abortion and a character at a dinner party boasting about his erection. It was attacked as a slur on womanhood. Introducing a later edition, Meghan Morris said Letty Fox had offended "because it presented a woman's account of her sexual and emotional life . . . it described the way women do live, not the way they are supposed to live".

Essay on Woman A notorious case in 18th century England. John Wilkes's pornographic parody of Pope's Essay on Man was written only for his rakish mates in the Hellfire Club and a tiny private edition was printed off a press in his own house.

His enemies in Parliament bribed the printers to give them a page and he was hauled up before his peers. He fled for his life to France, and in his absence was found guilty of obscene and seditious libel and declared an outlaw.

No original version of the poem survives and even copies are very rare, says Dr Patrick Spedding, associate director of the Centre for the Book at Monash University.

Erotic works of this vintage are now collectors' treasures: Dr Spedding acquired a facsimile edition of the 1788 Gentleman's Bottle Book for Monash University and it will be on display at the conference.
 
 

Nitschke wins reply

MEAGAN DILLON

July 7th, 2010

http://www.ntnews.com.au/article/2010/07/07/161851_ntnews.html

DARWIN'S "Doctor Death" Philip Nitschke has won his bid for a right of reply after claims a senator misrepresented information which implicated his book The Peaceful Pill Handbook and organisation Exit International in 14 suicides.

Dr Nitschke - a euthanasia advocate - said that Senator Steven Conroy had been "caught out" after deliberately misrepresenting the complex issue of youth suicide to suit his government's agenda.

That agenda was mandatory internet filtering which was to include Exit International - the leading organisation in voluntary euthanasia - of which Dr Nitschke is the director.

Dr Nitschke said he was pleased to receive the right of reply but not pleased the government had to go to such lengths to push its barrow.

Senator Conroy said in the May 24 estimates hearing that the handbook promotes a veterinary drug called Nembutal as the "peaceful pill" and Dr Nitschke helps people get the illegal drug from Mexico.

A recent report by the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine found that 14 people had overdosed on this drug.

The clarification of the figure was published in The Age in a letter to the editor by Victorian Institute Forensic Medicine Director, Professor Joan Ozanne-Smith. Prof Ozanne-Smith said that most of those dying of pentobarbitone toxicity had "knowledge of the drug and/or access to it from their work experience or workplace."

Senator Conroy failed to mention the clarification of the figures - taking them out of context.
 

Sawyer's Valley couple contacted suicide group before deaths

Josh Jerga
AAP
News.com
July 01, 2010

http://www.news.com.au/dead-couple-contacted-suicide-group-before-deaths/story-e6frg13u-1225886392568?from=public_rss

VIDEO: Nine News: Couple 'were devoted' to each...
Daughter of dead Sawyer's Valley couple tells of parents love and devotion

A TERMINALLY-ILL woman and her husband found dead in their home near Perth had contacted Dr Philip Nitschke's assisted suicide group three years ago, the right-to-die campaigner says.

The bodies of Jennifer Anne Stewart, 61 and her 66-year-old husband John were discovered on Monday by a family member in their home in Sawyer's Valley, 40km east of Perth.

Ms Stewart was terminally ill with cancer and it is believed she and her husband made a suicide pact.

Dr Nitschke said the couple had contacted the organisation he founded, Exit International, in February 2007 to seek information.

The organisation provides information and advocacy on assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia.

Dr Nitschke said the situation demonstrated a need for legislation which would allow terminally ill people the right to die and provide legal immunity to anyone who assisted.


``We've got a situation here of a person who's seriously ill, in fact close to death, who effectively needs assistance to end their life,'' he told AAP on Wednesday.

``For what I know of the issue, in Western Australia the person who provided that assistance would be looking at seriously legal penalties including life imprisonment.''

Dr Nitschke said there were accounts that Mr Stewart chose to end his own life through fear of the legal consequences he would face in assisting his wife to die.

He said the length of time between the couple's contact with the organisation and their apparent suicide demonstrated the Stewarts had made a rational decision.

``This should be quite reassuring that when people seek information, they take a lot of time to consider all their options,'' Dr Nitschke said.

``I'm sure the Stewarts considered all their options and then decided to take a path like this.

``I don't think we should be getting too distressed that this happened.''

WA Police said investigations continued into the deaths and whether there was any involvement of Mr Stewart in his wife's death.

Deputy Commissioner Chris Dawson today said it was possible police would not be able to determine the exact circumstances surrounding the deaths of Jennifer Stewart and her husband John.

Mr Dawson said post mortems had been conducted and police were awaiting further test results.

``(It) continues to be a major job in terms of actually determining the exact circumstances that led to this tragic event,'' Mr Dawson said.

``It will take a number of days for police, both in terms of the Major Crime investigators and the forensic officers, (who) will continue to work with all witnesses including family.''

``This is a traumatic tragedy and we will not be able to give a definitive outcome.''

Once police had completed the investigation, a report would be forwarded to the State Coroner, he said.

 

Euthanasia query in deaths probe

GABRIELLE KNOWLES and LUKE ELIOT,
The West Australian
June 29, 2010,
 
http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/breaking/7479023/euthanasia-query-in-deaths-probe/

UPDATE: Police are investigating whether a Sawyers Valley man helped his terminally ill wife die before taking his own life. The couple, John, 66, and Jennifer Stewart, 61, were found by their daughter at the Kirkstall Way home about 9.30am yesterday.

Major crime squad detectives and forensic experts were last night investigating whether the woman's husband had increased his wife's medication to assist with her death.

They are also investigating whether he then took enough of the medication to kill himself. Toxicology tests to confirm the theory could take days to prepare.

It is understood a note about the deaths was found at the house, but it is not known who wrote it or what was in the letter. Police will also investigate whether the couple formed a pact to take their lives together, and also whether the woman died from her illness, driving her husband to take his own life.

Neighbours said it was "terribly sad" to hear the couple had died. One woman said she had been relieved when she was told there had been no crime to worry about.

Neighbours in the Hills suburb mostly kept to themselves and said they only knew the couple, who are believed to have rented the property, to wave to and say hello.

Euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke told _The West Australian _ if the deaths were as they seemed it was another sad example of the desperation in situations where there was a terminal illness. "In some cases, one partner does not want to be without the other person so they enter a pact," he said. "In others, one may provide assistance for the other to die peacefully."

Dr Nitschke said in WA, even those acting out of compassion to help a loved one could then face a life jail term.

He said people suffering terminal illnesses should be able to have a peaceful legal death at the time of their choosing, and that it was a damning indictment of WA and other Australian jurisdictions where euthanasia was illegal.

The euthanasia issue entered the public arena last year in the final months of the life of quadriplegic Christian Rossiter, who died in September.

Mr Rossiter first spoke publicly of his wish to die in June 2009, about 12 months after he developed spastic quadriplegia after a fall. He won a landmark court case that would have forced his carers to stop feeding him through a tube, paving the way for him to end his life by starving to death.

Sharp rise in cases of euthanasia in Holland

The Catholic Herald
By Simon Caldwell

25 June 2010

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/articles/a0000851.shtml
 

CAPTION: Euthanasia campaigner Dr Philip Nitschke with a kit developed for people who want to end their lives PA Photo

Euthanasia cases in Holland have risen by a massive 13 per cent in the last year, new figures have revealed.

They have shot up for the second time in two years following a huge 10 per cent rise in 2008.

Last year a total of 2,636 Dutch people were killed by euthanasia, with 80 per cent of cases involving people dying at home after their doctors administered a lethal dose of drugs.

This compares to 2,331 reported deaths by euthanasia in 2008. The previous two years also saw rises in the number of cases, with 2,120 deaths by euthanasia in 2006, 1,923 deaths in 2006.

In 2003, the year after Holland became the first country in the world to legalise the practice since the fall of Nazi Germany, there were 1,815 reported cases.

Euthanasia is usually carried out by administering a strong sedative to put the patient in a coma, followed by a drug to stop breathing and cause death.

To qualify patients must be in unbearable pain and their doctor convinced they are making an informed choice. The opinion of a second doctor is also required. It has long been suspected that numbers of cases are being under-reported, however, as doctors apply a liberal interpretation of the law. Dutch medics have been accused of practising euthanasia on demand and sometimes killing people who cannot properly consent.

But Jan Suyver, chairman of the government’s euthanasia monitoring commission, said the rising number of cases came as the taboo once attached to euthanasia began to fade. “It could also be that doctors are more likely to report it,” he told NRC Handesblad, a Dutch newspaper.

Anti-euthanasia groups say, however, that the sharp increase is probably be linked to the collapse of the palliative care system in the Netherlands following the legalisation of euthanasia eight years ago.

Phyllis Bowman of Right to Life said: “I am sure that the increase in numbers of people opting for euthanasia is largely a result of inadequate pain control.”

Alison Davis, the coordinator for No Less Human, a disability rights group, said it was inevitable that cases would soar once the practice was legalised.

“They [doctors] start with what they call ‘strict safeguards’ and then quickly move on to embrace more and more victims,” she said.

“These are often people who doctors think ought to volunteer for euthanasia but they can’t for various reasons.”

Besides euthanasia, in which doctors administer a lethal cocktail of drugs to a patient, Holland also permits assisted suicide, in which the patient takes the drugs themselves, and also the infanticide of new-born disabled infants under the Groningen Protocol. But such cases are omitted from official euthanasia figures.

Also left out are cases of involuntary euthanasia, in which patients are killed by their doctors “without explicit request and consent”. Researchers in 2005 estimated that this accounts for about 550 deaths in Holland each year. The rise in cases in 2008 has prompted the Dutch health ministry to launch an inquiry into the working of the 2002 law and it is due to open its investigations by the end of the month.

Many Dutch are growing uneasy about the way in which the law has been applied. Among them is Dr Els Borst, the former health minister and deputy prime minister who guided the law through the Dutch parliament.

Last December she said she regretted that euthanasia was effectively destroying palliative care. Amsterdam, a city with a population of 1.2 million people, is now served by just two tiny hospices.

Evidence of abuses also emerged in Belgium last month when researchers found that nearly half of all nurses involved in euthanasia, which is legal, broke the law by taking part in “terminations [of patients’ lives] without request or consent”. Dignity in Dying – formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society – insists that assisted suicide could still work in practice.

 

Euthanasia debate: Church questions priorities


ABCNews
23Jun10

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/23/2934720.htm

 
The Church has questioned the use of the Attroney-General's resources to prepare the bill. (7pm TV News TAS)

Map: Hobart 7000 Related Story: New bid to legalise voluntary euthanasia The head of Tasmania's Anglican Church is concerned the Attorney-General intends to use departmental resources to prepare a private member's bill for voluntary euthanasia.

Lara Giddings will work with Greens Leader Nick McKim on rewriting his private member's bill which failed to get support last year.

Ms Giddings' office has confirmed she will use her office and department resources to prepare the bill.

The Anglican Bishop, Right Reverend John Harrower, says departmental resources could be better used.

"We have massive social issues in Tasmania and I'm quite dismayed that we would use these resources in this sort of way when we have people who are in real anguish in our community," he said.

"Our community is judged by the way we care for the least of our people in terms of least resources and those who have the most need for our love and compassion."

The Catholic Archbishop of Hobart Adrian Doyle agrees.

"I think particularly in the light of the fact that this bill was put forward just last year by Mr McKim, and thrown out rather decisively as it was in the Lower House, it never even went to the upper house, I think we've got a lot of other issues that we need to be concerned about," he said.

Independent Upper House MP Ruth Forrest says departmental resources would be better used on more pressing issues such as legal aid funding.

"I know as a private member if I want to introduce a private member's bill I would need to use my own resources," she said.

"Mind you I don't have the same resources that she would have as a minister obviously. I'm a bit uncertain about the appropriateness of that."

Bishop Harrower says he is extremely disappointed that the legislation will be revisited.

"We've looked at this twice, we've come to a clear decision and nothing has changed. Say no to this and yes to caring for the Tasmania community in terms of mental health and housing. Let's get our priorities right here and build a healthy Tasmania.

Pro-voluntary euthanasia campaigner Doctor Philip Nitschke says it will require politicians with courage to back the changes.

"I think it's a very sensible or responsible comment by her that they're going to look at the working models around the world and find one which is perhaps more suitable. There are plenty of working models around the world now," he said.

"There'll be a lot of opposition from the likes of people who simply don't see this as being a suitable or an appropriate piece of legislation and of course we've got our own Prime Minister and Federal Leader of the Opposition who strongly oppose these changes by-and-large."
 

Man charged for killing pain-ridden partner whose drug overdose failed

BELLINDA KONTOMINAS COURTS
June 21, 2010
Sydney Morning Herald

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/man-charged-for-killing-painridden-partner-whose-drug-overdose-failed-20100620-ypc0.html

SHE had overdosed on antidepressant pills twice in 24 hours. But when the drugs seemed to fail, David Scott Mathers did what he believed he should.

Mr Mathers told police he suffocated his partner of 22 years, Eva Griffiths, with a plastic bag to release her from the constant pain of osteoarthritis, a condition for which doctors had told her nothing could be done. He is now accused of her murder.

Mr Mathers, 66, was last week committed to stand trial in the Supreme Court, despite the apparent sympathy of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

The prosecutor, David Vautin, told the Downing Centre Local Court that in cases involving assisted suicide the Crown was ''regrettably … left in a situation where there is only one charge that we see as appropriate''.
In the three weeks before her death, Ms Griffiths had twice been taken to hospital in pain.

''I think she pretty much made up her mind to top herself then because she thought if things get to the stage where she had to go into a nursing home then this ability to take control would be taken from her,'' Mr Mathers told police.

When asked why he had killed his 78-year-old partner, Mr Griffiths told police: ''If I wasn't facing you having committed the crime I'd be facing her. She'd be immobilised and in pain if she moved and [asking] why didn't I do something when I could.''
Ms Griffiths had allegedly discussed her wishes with Mr Mathers and her twin sister, Lore Jackson, before writing a note.
She had also tried to obtain information on suicide from the Voluntary Euthanasia Society and the Exodus Foundation but ''didn't get anywhere'', Mr Mathers told police.

On the evening of July 5 last year, she took 18 antidepressant tablets with a glass of wine before drifting off to sleep, Mr Mathers told police. The next evening when she woke she was groggy and in pain, and he helped her take another 13 pills. More than 24 hours later she was still alive.

''I finished what she started, didn't I?'' Mr Mathers told police, explaining that he had first tried a pillow, then a towel, before he placed a plastic bag over her head.

A clinical pharmacologist, Dr Judith Perl, agreed that Ms Griffiths was probably already ''on the road to death'' when she was killed, due to the amount of drugs she had taken.

Counsel for Mr Mathers, Hugh White, told the court that he had been in discussions with the DPP regarding a possible plea to a lesser charge but was awaiting a psychiatric report before final talks would take place.
Mr Mathers will face court in August.

'Do not resuscitate' tattoo means exactly what it says

By EMMA BAILEY
The Timaru Herald
18/06/2010

http://www.stuff.co.nz/timaru-herald/news/3825942/Do-not-resuscitate-tattoo-means-exactly-what-it-says

Paula Westoby is very black and white about what she wants, with "do not resuscitate" tattooed across her chest.

The Exit International Dunedin convenor, who was born and raised in Timaru, wants to set up a chapter in her old home town.

The lively 81-year-old is not ready to shuffle off the mortal coil yet but when she does she wants to die peacefully and choose how it happens.

She is part of the organisation Exit International, founded by Darwin's Dr Philip Nitschke, also known as Dr Death. The organisation advocated end-of-life choices and assisted suicide, with chapters around the world and soon, Ms Westoby hopes, in Timaru.

"It is unfortunate the way the word euthanasia is used now. It is a Greek word meaning a good death.

"People can't imagine what it is like to be really sick and have no quality of life. If you get to the stage where you are half-paralysed and in terrible pain, would you want to hang about in that state of being?"

She is happy discussing the subject that normally makes others uncomfortable and became part of Exit a few years ago after she went to listen to Dr Nitschke speak.

"He asked me to be the convenor in Dunedin which I am. The problem is it's actually quite a hard slog there. I have friend in Nelson and her group is thriving, so I want to see what interest there is in Timaru.

"I want people you can rebound ideas with; I am fairly lively in my thinking. Obviously I am a bit different from your little old lady at home baking scones."

She credits her outlook to a less- than-conventional upbringing in Timaru. "I applied for training college but wasn't accepted and found out a few years later the headmistress at Timaru Girls' High school vetoed it because of my agnostic views.

With training college not an option, in 1947 upon leaving school she decided to become a nurse.

She credits being a nurse with firming up her belief in the right to choose your end.

When her five children had grown up she sold her house and all her belongings, jumped on a Russian ship and travelled to Europe. She lived for a while in London and did not return to New Zealand for 20 years.

Now in Dunedin, age is no reason for the grandmother of 12 to slow down, having the "do not resuscitate" tattoo when she was 79 and averaging one skydive a year.

"I am going to do my next jump in Queenstown. It will be the highest jump I do, so high we probably will need oxygen as we glide down through the Remarkables.

"I actually hope I die doing a sky jump. The instructors have told me about one man who had a heart attack and died while doing a dive and when he got to the ground he had a huge smile on his face."

Were Robert Miller and James Robertson influenced by Dr Philip Nitschke?

Times Online
June 14, 2010
Behind the story: Charlene Sweeney

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article7149562.ece
 
A key issue for detectives will be whether Robert Miller and James Robertson were influenced by Philip Nitschke, the Australian medic nicknamed Dr Death. Dr Nitschke, who founded the pro-euthanasia group Exit International, is also the inventor of the “deliverance machine”, a syringe linked to a laptop that can administer a lethal injection.

Dr Nitschke said that he created the device to allow those wishing to take their own life to initiate the process instead of relying on a doctor. A needle is inserted into the arm of the patient before he or she answers questions on the laptop. It is made clear that if they choose the final option they will be injected with a lethal barbiturate.

The system was used legally under the Northern Territory’s Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995 to kill four Australians. It was outlawed in 1997.

Last year Dr Nitschke toured Britain giving suicide workshops to the elderly. Although those attending had to be over 50, there are fears that his information is being accessed by the young, the vulnerable, and the mentally ill.

The presence of a webcam in the hotel room where they died will also raise concerns that they may have been followers of suicide chat rooms, where people discuss their fantasies about killing themselves. Such sites attract “suicide voyeurs”.

In April, William Melchert-Dinkel, 47, an American nurse, was charged with goading a British man and a Canadian woman to take their own lives after masquerading as a woman in chatrooms. US prosecutors claim he used pseudonyms including Lia Dao, and Falcon Girl, to persuade people into pacts in which they would hang themselves in front of internet webcams and watch each other die. He is believed to have contacted more than 100 people around the world, and been involved in five other deaths.
 

University students commit 'suicide by laptop'

Examiner.com
June 13,2010
PMTech Buzz Examiner
Michael Santo

http://www.examiner.com/x-39728-Tech-Buzz-Examiner~y2010m6d13-University-students-commit-suicide-by-laptop
 

Two University of Edinburgh students, Robert Miller, 20, and James Robertson, 19, have apparently committed "suicide by laptop." The pair, childhood friends, used a device attached to a laptop computer to administer a lethal injection, similar to Dr. Philip Nitschke's so-called Deliverance Machine.

On Wednesday, Miller and Robertson were found slumped over in chairs, facing each other, at the Ramada Jarvis Hotel in Ayr, 80 miles from the University of Edinburgh, where they were both studying for joint maths and physics degrees. A webcam was found close to the pair, and it is believed they may have filmed their final moments.

Strathclyde Police examined the laptop and said they are not treating the deaths as suspicious. Edinburgh University is reportedly working with the police in an attempt to discover more information over the reasons behind the deaths of the students.

Dr. Philip Nitschke was also called Dr. Death. A pro-euthanasia doctor, the "Deliverance Machine" (above) consisted of a laptop connected to a syringe driver that could deliver a lethal dose of medication, after patients answered a yes to a series of questions proposed by the software, "Deliverance." Nitschke was instrumental in the passage of a pro-euthanasia law in 1995.

With the passage of the law, his machine became legal in Australia's Northern Territory. To deliver the dose, a patient had to answer a series of questions delivered to them by the notebook's software, which was dubbed "Deliverance." It was used by four terminally ill Australians before it was banned in 1997, when the law was overturned by the Federal government.
 

Dignified deaths may need a lesson in hacking

NT News
June 3rd, 2010

http://www.ntnews.com.au/article/2010/06/03/152791_ntnews.html

EUTHANASIA advocate Dr Philip Nitschke is giving Darwin seniors a how-to masterclass in computer hacking this Saturday.

The class - open to all - is a new component of safe suicide/voluntary euthanasia workshops that are held by Exit International in Darwin each year.

Dr Nitschke said the masterclass would teach people how to bypass the Federal Government's planned internet censorship of euthanasia websites.

"We will be taking people through two of the most common strategies that will become increasingly used if the legislation is passed," he said.

The Government has mainly pitched the mandatory filter as a way of blocking sites involving child sex abuse and sexual violence, although various other types of sites have also been included.

Dr Nitschke said the Government used "wedge tactics" against those who opposed parts of the mandatory filter by accusing them of helping child molesters. "You get wedged and it makes it very hard for someone to argue about it," he said.

The Darwin masterclass and workshop are the end of a two-month national tour around the nation's capitals.

The average age of those attending was 75 years.

"They're not sick people but they want to know if they deteriorate that they've got at their fingertips some strategy ... for a peaceful death."

Everyone is welcome to attend the public meeting and hacking masterclass, which starts at 1pm at Palmerston Library Community Room.

Only Territorians of sound mind and aged over 50 can then attend a euthanasia workshop - explaining the how-to nuts and bolts - which starts at 2pm.

People can also get the hacking information by visiting www.exitinternational.net and clicking on 'internet masterclass' on the activities dropdown menu.
 

Internet filter bypass workshop comes to NT

By David Coady
ABC News
Posted June 2, 2010

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/02/2916182.htm?site=idx-nt

The voluntary euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke is bringing his controversial workshop on bypassing internet filters to Darwin.

Dr Nitschke says his organisation has held workshops in every capital city in the last two months and more than 1000 people have attended.

He says he is working in a legal grey area and will only be providing information.

"The Territory is important not just in the Australian context, but in a global context," he said.

"It was the world's first place where people could lawfully get help to die.

"Back in 1996 four of my patients took that course.

"It was revolutionary legislation, but of course the Federal Government let it only stay in place for eight months."
 

Explore the history of banned books in Australia

University of Melbourne
June 2010

http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/musse/?p=4462

A new exhibition at the Baillieu Library will explore the history of censorship in Australia.

Banned Books in Australia is curated by Ms Jenny Lee, Associate Professor David Bennett and Associate Professor Richard Pennell, from the Arts Faculty, and designed with the help of recent Faculty of the VCA and Music graduate Ms Jenny Chang.

The exhibition includes books, photographs, documents and original artworks exploring aspects of censorship in Australia.

Associate Professor Bennett says, “It’s important that past and present practices of censorship in Australia be scrutinised and highlighted.

“Freedom of expression, even in a liberal democratic nation that is a signatory to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, is a highly circumscribed principle, subject to numerous ‘states of exception’, and the question of its limits is always a political question, subject to contestation by conflicting interest-groups,” he explains.

The exhibition will also delve into current censorship issues surrounding books such as euthanasia activist Phillip Nitschke’s The Peaceful Pill and the controversy surrounding the work of photographer Bill Henson.

Curator of Special Collections at the library Ms Pam Pryde says there are also a number of local and overseas artists contributing to the exhibition. A number of artists have created works responding to the overall theme of censorship whilst others have adopted an individual book to respond to.

Ms Pryde explains that the original idea for this exhibition began in 2007 when the Classification Review Board of the Office of Film and Literature Classification refused classification to two books held in the University’s Special Collections.

The books in question were Defence of the Muslim Lands and Join the Caravan by the late Abdullah Azzam.

The idea lay dormant for several years until the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand (BSANZ) decided to hold a conference titled To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books in 2010 (14-16 July, State Library of Victoria), and asked the University of Melbourne and Monash University to host exhibitions to support the conference.

Banned Books in Australia will be exhibited in the Baillieu Library, and will run from 7 June – 29 August. Further details, 
http://www.unimelb.edu.au/culturalcollections/exhibitions/forthcoming.html
 

'Dr Death' planning to hold euthanasia workshop in Eastbourne

Eastbourne Herald
Date: 28 May 2010

http://www.eastbourneherald.co.uk/news/39Dr-Death39-planning-to-hold.6326686.jp


AN EUTHANASIA expert dubbed Dr Death is again planning to hold a euthanasia event in Eastbourne.

Dr Philip Nitschke, from the group Exit International, had hoped to hold the controversial workshop in Eastbourne back in October 2008.

The group had booked the Langham Hotel, but the hotel cancelled the booking amid fears in the town that the event may have broken the law.

Eastbourne Borough Council also confirmed it had refused a booking at one of its venues.

Local churchgoers had planned to hold a prayer vigil outside the seafront hotel during the workshop and former Eastbourne MP Nigel Waterson made a complaint to Sussex Police as he was concerned the event was breaking the law. At the time, a spokesperson from Exit International said the group was 'very disappointed' but still hoped to hold the event in Eastbourne.

And this week Dr Nitschke said he had made fresh plans to hold a talk in Eastbourne – but had yet to find a venue. Dr Nitschke was the first doctor in the world to administer a legal, lethal, voluntary injection under the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act of the Northern Territory of Australia. The original workshop would have given an overview of euthanasia and the law surrounding it.

Then participants would be asked to sign a disclaimer before taking part in the workshop, when they would be given advice on how to die peacefully and shown DIY suicide kits.

Last May, Dr Nitschke gave a talk in Brighton on assisted suicide, but the workshop was cancelled at the request of the venue.

Canberra Senate
Senate Estimates
Mon 24May10

Senator WORTLEY—I have one final question in relation to Google. There are comments that euthanasia sites will be blocked under the government’s proposal. Is that correct?

Senator Conroy—The euthanasia debate is interesting because Philip Nitschke’s book, The Peaceful Pill Handbook, promotes a veterinary drug called Nembutal as the peaceful pill and Nitschke helps people obtain the illegal barbiturate from Mexico.

A recent report by the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine found that six people in their 20s and eight in their 30s have died from an overdose of this particular drug. In only 11 out of 38 cases has a deceased suffered significant physical illness, deteriorating health or chronic pain. In 27 cases there was no reference to these factors, prompting some to speculate that these people had committed suicide because of psychological or psychiatric reasons.

Philip Nitschke’s response to young people and those with mental illness accessing suicide instructions was that—and I quote: There will be some casualties—but this has to be balanced with the growing pool of older people who feel immense wellbeing from having access to this information.

The Rudd government does not agree that some casualties by way of the suicide of vulnerable people is an acceptable balance. It should be noted that it is currently illegal to use a telephone, fax, email or the internet to discuss or research assisted suicide.

The importation of Nembutal is a criminal offence and the penalty is 25 years jail or a $550,000 fine.

Conroy: We’ll block 50,000 sites

May 25, 2010
by Bernard Keane
Crikey.com

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/thestump/2010/05/25/conroy-well-block-50000-sites/


In Senate Estimates last night, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy warned the Government would consider blocking up to 50,000 websites based on new filtering technology that may become available in the future.

The Government’s net filter trials early last year had found there were substantial technical limitations with blocking any more than 10,000 sites using a blacklist-based approach.  In response to a question from Greens Senator Scott Ludlam about how the Government would implement a filter based on more than 10,000 blacklisted websites, Conroy boasted he has been told of filtering technology that could block “up to 50,000 sites”.

“Technology evolves,” Conroy declared, noting that the question was hypothetical.

Conroy had earlier used Estimates to launch a savage ten-minute attack on Google over its collection of wi-fi data as part of Street View photo collection.  Google has pointedly refused to cooperate with Conroy’s net filter plans.  Google’s assistance is necessary because the net filter trial found that a blacklist-based filtering approach breaks down on “high-traffic sites” like Youtube. Asked to define “high traffic sites”, Conroy said they were “popular sites”.  He later suggested one definition might be sites that have more than 10% of internet traffic.

However, when asked by Liberal Senator Mary Jo Fisher what he was actually doing about possible breaches of the Telecommunications Act by Google, Conroy said he thought the Privacy Commissioner was handling the issue.

Conroy later launched an attack on euthanasia websites, which he linked to the deaths of teenagers involved Nembutal, and on Facebook’s problems with privacy settings.