Rudeness or Freedom of Speech...
Wow what a week first we have the President of the US of A dropping in for a quick hello and speech and at the same time (literally) we have the the President of China stopping by. To top it all off the biggest export deal in the history of Australia was announced with China buying $30 billion worth of natural gas!! That's $5 billion more than the mammoth deal done last year with China - a couple more like this and China will rocket to #1 Trading Partner position.
Technorati Tags: Australian, Politics, Society
The interesting thing is that the "Australian Greens" Senator Bob Brown who stood up and made an attempt to interrupt George Bush seems to have been dismissed by our esteemed Prime Minister and the press as variously "embarrassing" or a "National Disgrace". Interestingly a man who I generally have little respect for and who seems amazingly ill suited to his job expressed the Opposition parties differences of opinion the right way. Simon Crean (Leader of the Opposition) presented an appropriate response and as a result George listened to him for twice his allotted time. Funnily enough I initially agreed with the "National Disgrace" sentiment and to some respect I still do - from my personal point of view I do not think it was an appropriate nor civilised way for Bob Brown to behave, however, I am in retrospect glad that it happened.
Ke?Why? because it shows the clearly that Australia has a lively, functional Democracy and that while it doesn't specifically have "Freedom of Speech" as defined by the US Constitution, representation of community views, even via disrespectful forms, can still be achieved in our Houses of Government. The really cool thing is that when you look at some of the survey's being run by Australian online newspapers most of us have come to the same conclusion. That survey shows that about 37% of the population thought it was ranging from bad manners to "national embarrassment" while the other 63% thought "Someone had to say something" ranging up to this being "Freedom of Speech in action" while a very small majority (3%) thought the efforts of Bob were "Feeble" at best. When I last looked about 20,000 people had voted which is a heft chunk of the online community - nearly a whole % point.
I doubt very much that a similar protest would happen or be let happen in the US Congress - of course I'm happy for anyone to cite instances where this has occurred because it might indicate that the US is healthier than I think it is. Perhaps I should qualify that, recent examples please - Vietnam war stuff really isn't relevant to the US of today.
By the way I evolved my opinion of the US over a period of about a decade, between 1990 and 2001 I travelled to the US between 2 and 3 times each year for various conferences, expo's and selling software products that the companies I CTO'd for developed. Of course I also went there a couple of times just for holidays :)
