Socks?

[Oz Referee]

Originally Posted by BillyMac

What is "obscene" under U.S. law has plagued our courts for the last fifty years......

Yeah I have always found it amusing at how censored American TV shows are, compared to Australian programs. I have never (that I can recall) seen a mainstream US show that uses the F (or even S) word, or directly mentions things like abortion. While these are much more prevalent in Australian made programs (not suggesting this is better/worse, just different).

Considering that we have no Bill of Rights or constitutional right to the freedom of speech, I find it kind of ironic that it appears that the US mainstream media is more censored than ours.

Originally Posted by BillyMac

I read in the today's newspaper that the Australian government is trying to encourage it's citizens to decrease their alcohol consumption, especially binge drinking. How's that going? We tried that from 1920 to 1933. Didn't work.

Yeah, this has been an ongoing issue for a while. In Australia the legal drinking age is 18, which is also the age that most people leave school and get their drivers license.....you can imagine the consequences. Also in the last 3-5 years there has been a dramatic increase in binge drinking by teens, largely blamed on the price and marketing of Ready-To-Drink "alco-pops" (Jim Beam and Coke etc). As a result, the government increased the tax on RTD's by 100% about 6 months ago. This did nothing to help the problem, in fact has just made more young people drink spirits that they mix themeselves.
As well, there is some talk that the Australian government is going to ban ALL advertising of alcohol, including sponsorship of sporting events/teams. Will be interesting to see if that has any impact - it seemed to work when the same ban was put in place for tobacco.
As a high school teacher, I am very interested in seeing what happens with these issues......