Another Round of Street Corner Meetings
Our state and federal local members, Jane Lomax-Smith and Kate Ellis respectively, held one in their series of street corner meetings on the weekend at Memorial Gardens near where I live. As usual I wandered over as I like to engage with our politicians and raise any issues that are on my mind at the time.
The issue I raised with Jane was about the plan of SA state premier Mike Rann to abolish the state’s upper house. I can’t begin to express how uneasy about the whole political process in SA this makes me as the upper house allows minor parties that represent a proportion of the whole state of SA to have a voice as opposed to the lower house where the majority of people in a particular electorate elect a member. Jane was of the opinion that this measure wouldn’t be approved at a referendum and that upper house reform was the real agenda which was news to me considering the media reports linked above. I was particularly unimpressed by the way in which this was announced after the Labor party had won the election but not before. Jane Lomax-Smith is a person that strikes me as being able to put on a particularly polised performance no matter what is going on under the surface so I am never really sure what she is actually thinking. Time will tell as to what happens.
The issue I raised with Kate Ellis was about the way that the DRM reigime being put forward by the major technology vendors (Apple and Microsoft) puts unfair monopoly power in the hands of the content distributors, trampling on the rights of the artists and consumers to sell and use the content in ways that suit them (without infringing copyright that is) I pointed her to some interesting legislation in France as well as to some articles by David Berlind to see if we can get some action. I’m not very hopeful but then again this is the sort of issue that Australia has taken a lead on in the past. Kate strikes me as being a very genuine person but I’m not sure whether the message got home. She didn’t seem to be very technology literate but I’m hoping someone on her staff is.
I was the only one to turn up to that particular meeting so I had good access to both members.
