There’s been a lot of concern – bordering on panic – among Vanuatu businesses over the last few days, following a vote in Parliament to amend the Vanuatu Employment Act.
Tag: law
The Price of Freedom
Australia’s Labour government recently announced that they would be implementing a two-tiered, national content-filtering scheme for all Internet traffic. The proposal as it stands is that people will have a choice of Internet connections: The first will block all Internet content considered unsafe for children. The second will allow adult content, but block anything deemed illegal under Australian law. People can choose one or the other, but they must choose one.
As with all public content-filtering schemes, this idea is well-intentioned, but fatally flawed.
Australia’s Labour government recently announced that they would be implementing a two-tiered, national content-filtering scheme for all Internet traffic. The proposal as it stands is that people will have a choice of Internet connections: The first will block all Internet content considered unsafe for children. The second will allow adult content, but block anything deemed illegal under Australian law. People can choose one or the other, but they must choose one.
As with all public content-filtering schemes, this idea is well-intentioned, but fatally flawed.
National content filtering is an inefficient and fundamentally faulty technical approach that deputises the nation’s Internet Service Providers to the role of neighbourhood sherriff, something they’re not at all comfortable with. Second, and more importantly, it creates a dangerous legal and moral precedent that is difficult to distinguish from the infamous Great Firewall of China, which is regularly used to stifle social and political dissent.
Indeed, a spokesman for the online rights group Electronic Frontiers Australia recently said, “I’m not exaggerating when I say that this model involves more technical interference in the internet infrastructure than what is attempted in Iran, one of the most repressive and regressive censorship regimes in the world.”
The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Few laws spend their entire existence un-amended. If changes are required, they can be made after the Family Protection Act is promulgated. To suggest any further consideration by parliament at this time ensures that it will be years before it sees the light of day again, if it survives at all.
[Originally published in slightly different form in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]
NOTE: Two days after this article was published, the Daily Post front page story is of a 25 year old woman who was picked up in town by her common-law partner, taken home and beaten over the head with a piece of firewood. The man then proceeded to inflict knife wounds on her feet before severing her right arm close to the elbow and cutting her left hand so badly that only the thumb remained intact. It unimaginable that her neighbours didn’t hear her screams. The assailant was arrested 2 hours after these events took place.
When president Kalkot Mataskelekele announced that he would refer the Family Protection Act to the Supreme Court, he undertook a perilous task.
The Act, which has been crawling its way through the legislative process for nearly a decade, was passed in the final session of Parliament before elections later this year. Now, the president’s desire to ensure the constitutionality of the Act might have the unintended consequence of killing it outright.
It may be that if the Supreme Court responds with anything less than unequivocal affirmation of the Act’s constitutionality, they will leave it in legal limbo. Even the tiniest change would force it to be reintroduced as new legislation when the new Parliament is convened. This leaves the justices caught between the devil and the deep blue sea: Their only options, effectively, are to strike it down outright or accept it in its entirety.
Strange Bedfellows
[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post‘s Weekender Edition.]
Modern Vanuatu society expresses its values three ways: through kastom, the law and the church. If we reflect honestly on each of them, we have to admit that not one is ideally implemented. Nonetheless, each is inextricably woven into our identity, and thus bound to the other two.
It’s sometimes tempting to think about the tension between each of these influences in exclusive terms, to assume that certain things belong in one domain and therefore not in another. When the chief, the policeman and the pastor don their respective robes of office, we think we see a clear distinction.
But as with all things, the differences are far clearer in the abstract than in real life.
Kastom & The Law: Worlds Apart
It’s hard to decide whether our comprehensive understanding of the causes of crime should be cause for joy or despair. If we see so clearly what needs doing, why don’t we do it?
(Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post‘s Weekender Section.)
Last week’s summit on crime at the University of the South Pacific produced many useful recommendations. Perhaps too many.
The recommendations emerging from the 3 day workshop covered an immense scope: Law enforcement, the judicial and penal systems, the role of chiefs, social justice, ethics and civics education as well as employment were all identified as areas where conditions must improve in order to alleviate crime.
It’s hard to decide whether our comprehensive understanding of the problem should be cause for joy or despair. If we see so clearly what needs doing, why don’t we do it?
Allow me to offer an unwelcome answer: We don’t do anything because we as a society don’t want to.
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