Tag: Freedom Of Information

Aussie Journos’ Jobs

Zoe Zamlos reported in yesterday’s Australian Financial Review that: “The Albanese government’s revised plan to tax technology giants that refuse to pay publishers could inadvertently cause major cuts in funding and job losses at Australia’s two biggest commercial news companies, News Corporation and Nine Entertainment.”

Today is the 54th annversary of the death of iconic film star Marilyn Monroe who said both:

“I have found freedom and independence, and I don’t intend to give them up.”

and

“I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented, or even beautiful, but because I had never belonged to anyone else.”

In 1962 Marilyn Monroe died at the age of 36.

Loved. Used. Totally unusal.

Human individuality in all its forms is what makes us human.

When we allow big powers of any type to replace individuals with inhuman power, we stop being what we are and what we need to be.

Journos’ jobs matter.

Geoff Fox, August 5, 2026, Melbourne, Australia

Freedom Of Speech

“….. we must fly a rebel flag/As others did before us,/And we must sing a rebel song/And join in rebel chorus.” -from Freedom On The Wallaby, a poem by Henry Lawson, who died 103 years ago on this date in 1922.

Lawyer, author and military historian John Story warned on May 31 this year that the Australian Labor Party’s “thumping electoral victory” earlier in that month could lead to “more subtle” attacks on Free Speech.

Today, a proposed change to federal Freedom of Information laws leads analyst Stephen Rice to write in The Australian newspaper: “Labor’s contempt for a free press – and for the electorate – is deepening every day (and the) culture of secrecy is deepening under Labor.”

Rice describes current practices with respect to the free flow of information as: “The kind of abuse of process that actually damages a thriving democracy.”

This is the work of the Albanese government.

Geoff Fox, September 2nd, 2025, Melbourne, Australia