Yay!!! Once again, little Johnny doing this country’s heritage of a free democracy proud!

BTW – I managed to inherit no small number of Oz magazines from my folks… STILL stellar reading, some 30 plus years later!

Marcus, what’s my chances of borrowing some? I didn’t get to Australia until 1996 and never got to see the Oz, though I’ve seen a few online excerpts.

Australia ranks 41 in the world for press freedom. This oughta knock us down a couple more!

The excuse given by Melbourne I/T, that the Neville site appeared to be a ‘phishing’ operation, is both offensive and nefarious. ‘Phishing’ involves seeking to obtain information from users like bank card or internet banking details; the parody does nothing of the sort.

Technically, the parody site is still online on the Yahoo servers, but you can’t get there by clicking up the URL. Melbourne I/T have shut off the DNS which turns the URL into the IP of the Yahoo server. Transferring the domain to another registrant would solve it.

weez – yeah! for sure. I won’t be home for a couple of days, but yeah, just send me an email & we can work out a good time for you to grab them.

What a joke… Parody, satire and simply taking the piss have always been part of Australian culture. Just goes to show what the government’s real agenda is in this department – stifling any creative opposition to it’s ultra conservative follow the leader line.

To be reasonably fair to the Gubmint (as if it’s necessary- they don’t play fair- see Scott Parkin), Neville didn’t alter the images he took from the pm.gov.au website for use in his parody. Neville made it all too easy for the site to be knocked off on a garden-variety intellectual property infringement complaint.

I can think of a squillion things I might have done to the heading banner image to both send a bigger message about the Australian involvement in Shrubya’s oil war and more technically qualify the thing as a spoof. In example, Howard might have been shown to be surveying a Baghdad street full of corpses after a car bombing instead of addressing a group of out-of-focus though identfiably European faces.

I’m a bit surprised that an activist as experienced as Neville didn’t make it a bit harder to get the thing yanked by the Gubmint. However, the site being pulled offline on the orders of Australian officials was probably as good for the publicity of Neville’s point of view as the parody itself.

Thanks for that Neville link!

No wux, Jennifer. Anytime the gubmint interferes with critical political commentary, it’s newsy enough to blog.

Now that’s when you have a whole pile of mirror sites ready to press go….

“I’m a bit surprised that an activist as experienced as Neville didn’t make it a bit harder to get the thing yanked by the Gubmint. However, the site being pulled offline on the orders of Australian officials was probably as good for the publicity of Neville’s point of view as the parody itself.”

!Exactamente!