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Byron Shire
March 28, 2024

Freedom of speech?

Latest News

Saddle Road group home DA decision this week

Plans to build Byron Shire’s first permanent group home for women and children in housing stress are moving ahead, with the development application for the project coming before Council this week.

Other News

It’s a biggest little town festival! 

Supporters, performers, and volunteers gathered to launch the Mullum Laneways Festival 2024 last Friday. 

Got a creative theatre idea?

Mullumbimby’s The Drill Hall Theatre Company (DHTC) is offering two creative development opportunities for local independent artists to develop new performance piece concepts.

Seize the Decade report outlines benefits of renewables

The Climate Council says many more Australian families can directly benefit from rooftop solar and batteries under a new plan that spells out how we can electrify the nation and cut climate pollution this decade.

Heavy traffic on M1 predicted over Easter long weekend

Bottlenecks in Northern NSW are predicted to occur at Coffs Harbour and Tugun over the Easter long weekend. This is expected to be further impacted by work on the Pacific Highway just north of the Queensland border.

NORPA’s wild ride at Lismore Showgrounds

NORPA is taking audiences on an adventure outside the theatre once again, announcing it will stage its original work Wildskin in a warehouse space at the Lismore Showgrounds. A sensory, destination theatre experience, Wildskin inhabits an outrageous and unpredictable world that’s part bush-thriller, part road-trip and a whole lot of NORPA’s signature theatrical style.

Mullum and Byron locals lock on at Ewingar State Forest

Byron Bay and Mullumbimby locals Emma Briggs and Bassi Brown locked onto machinery at Ewingar State Forest, in the Upper Clarence area, yesterday as they called for an end to native forest logging. 

The ‘freedom of speech’ campaign waged around the aggressive right-wing and racist views of Murdoch media’s Andrew Bolt has run its course in commercial media circles. But what if an individual such as a Murdoch media-reviled union member were denied his/her ‘freedom of speech’ over his/her job by say, a mining corporation?

Would the Murdoch media and other commercial media go in to bat for this individual? Would Australia see the same emotional input from the ‘(ir)rational right’ that Andrew Bolt seems to draw breath from? What of the other more balanced Australian press (commercial or other)? Would we see daily eulogising of this individual’s right to speak freely, to associate freely?

Does the Murdoch media have balance on issues of ‘freedom’?

Methinks not.

Perhaps this is like other things: just about ‘perceptions’ as the male-only editor-in-chief of ‘The unAustralian’ claims?

Ian Ward
Ballina

 


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