Draconian Australian Research Law Hits Scientists 150
An anonymous reader writes: The Australian government is pushing ahead with a draconian law placing "dual use" science (e.g. encryption, biotechnology) under the control of the Department of Defence. The Australian ACLU, Civil Liberties Australia, warns the law punishes scientists with $400,000 fines, 10 years in jail and forfeiture of their work, just for sending an "inappropriate" e-mail.
Scientists — including the academics union — warn the laws are unworkable despite attempted improvements, and will drive researchers offshore (paywalled: mirror here).
Scientists — including the academics union — warn the laws are unworkable despite attempted improvements, and will drive researchers offshore (paywalled: mirror here).
Does fosters beer (Score:1)
Lame
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Actually, yes.
Beer/Alcohol research has always multipurpose; from basic food preservation (under similar conditions water goes bad faster than beer) to potential health benefits (red wine (in moderation) can be good for you).
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I take it you missed the article saying that no consumption of alcohol is good for you, and the previous studies failed to take other factors into account before announcing their findings that alcohol could be beneficial?
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Those studies are wrong.
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I want to see more research on the subject.
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So do you just pick and chose what studies you believe?
Yes, right from inception -"beer of revenge" (Score:2)
http://www.themalthouse.co.nz/blog/125-the-beer-of-revenge
Louis Pasteur's beer is the basis of Fosters.
Better link (Score:2)
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From http://www.jcu.edu.au/cgc/Beer... [jcu.edu.au]
when I think "Australia" (Score:1, Interesting)
I think kangaroos, and draconian laws. They conservatives are the way they are because of fear. Is this because everything in Australia can kill you?
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No surprise! Labor supported the data surveillance laws too https://newmatilda.com/2015/03/24/labor-and-journalists-have-sold-you-out-brandis-surveillance-law
Labor and Liberals same.
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Same here in the USA (Score:5, Interesting)
Voters are just the "little people".
Notice how power shifts from one to the other and they keep adding bricks, each to their own wall, but neither side takes down bits the other side has put up?
Someday, the walls will meet and you will be on the outside...
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The Berlin wall was not built to keep people on the outside.
And that is why it failed...
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Well in its defense, communism fails faster if you can't keep people from leaving.
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So does capitalism.
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That doesn't make any sense. Nobody is trying to escape capitalist countries to get to communist ones (unless they're some kind of wanted felon or something.) It always has been the other way around, which is why communist countries have to forbid their citizenry from leaving, and was the entire purpose of the Berlin Wall.
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Which of the two political parties in America want to roll back Imperial Washington?
Which of the two political parties wants an ever larger, ever more powerful government and which one has a large percentage of people who want to go to a government with limited powers as enumerated in the US Constitution?
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Which of the two political parties in America want to roll back Imperial Washington?
Neither.
Which of the two political parties wants an ever larger, ever more powerful government and which one has a large percentage of people who want to go to a government with limited powers as enumerated in the US Constitution?
Both parties want a larger, more powerful government, despite what the libertarians say. When was the last time anyone actually made the government smaller? The only difference is what shape the l
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There is another party (including almost all of its supporters) which has contempt for limited government.
As to making the government smaller - no it is rarely done. But what would you have done? Nothing?
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The people in power and the people trying to push the country in one direction or the other are not identical.
There are three groups here:
1) People actually in power (which means able to influence the government). These include a lot of non-elected people and organizations such as government employees, lobbyists, special interest groups, media outlets (Fox, MSNBC), and large corporations. These may or may not belong to or support a particluar party. They always look out for their own best interests.
2) Pe
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The government was much more limited (comparatively so) 20 years ago. While I don't think we'll ever get to a government as promoted by von Mises, Hayek, Rothbard or Samuelson it doesn't mean that I should not promote the concept of individual freedom and actively promote those factions within the 2 parties that would help push the country in that general direction.
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Two words: Drop bears.
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Bears: dropped.
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There are exists to the N, E, and S. There is a bears here.
The stupid is strong with these people! (Score:5, Insightful)
If they criminalize research and communication regarding IT security, they will soon be without it. That is basically suicide in today's Internet.
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Not so much "be without it", but more like "out of the loop with researchers in the field".
That is beyond stupid for a Five Eyes [wikipedia.org] nation. One would expect measures to draw researchers into the country. Not chase them away!
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Is there any country in the world that's not screwing up how IT-related laws are handled? It seems like every government is just paranoid of losing control.
Re:The stupid is strong with these people! (Score:5, Insightful)
You are not wrong on that. My impression is that governments are so afraid of their population, that they are willing to risk losing it all. Paranoids make the absolutely worst leaders, yet these seem to be what rises to the top.
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There are different levels of stupidity. And it stretches out in different directions. For example, in Germany it is complicated to have public wi-fi and they had create a law similar to the UK as a web black list to stop child porn. However, the latter was never applied, as the public outraged and they dropped it with a new law. Presently, they try to do fix the first issue too. However, media industry is very much in it, so it might take some time until it gets away.
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Re:The stupid is strong with these people! (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason for the law "The DTCA is intended to simplify trade between Australia, the US and the UK" that being imports from the US and UK. So yeah, it basically kills research in Australia on purpose, to force it into import only mode, to ensure those other two countries can buy primary resources and lots of land with funny money from two countries rapidly sliding into bankruptcy. Note the same political party is looking to raise university fees to US levels and open market the education loans. Australians are only meant to be servants for the future owners of Australia (after he made sure his daughter got a scholarship from a soon to be fully funded private university and a no work job and the person who tattled, to ensure they aligned with US styled freedom of information, was prosecuted). They did fund medical research though, but want to make big cuts universal health care, the rich only will get the use of Australian tax payer funded medical research.
The USA already did that, hence RSA (Score:3)
Well, I guess they don't need to do any science... (Score:5, Insightful)
Notice anything odd? The word 'military' shows up along the usual trio of "nuclear, chemical, biological". Last I checked, the boundaries of 'military weapons' were very, very, broad, running the gamut from fancy-nuclear-power aerospace widgetry to relatively crude hand-fabricated small arms more or less loosely based on designs dating back to the first half of the 20th century, if not older.
Is there some stricter definition of 'military weapons' that makes this slightly less ridiculous, or are they in fact export-controlling basically any tech you could conceivably integrate into a weapon in some fashion, including weapons already extremely widely available, adequately functional with downright crude technology, and otherwise utterly absurd to pretend are still within the reach of counter-proliferation efforts?
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Someone should show time MacGyver. They will limit access to toilet paper, knifes etc.
Wouldn't it be nice (Score:4, Insightful)
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Even then it would obviously not cover obscenity, which is defined as "I know it when I see it". And, well, the algorithmic description of SHA-1 [wikipedia.org] is pretty suggestive, don't you think?
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And yet not once has the second amendment stopped your government from ignoring the Constitution that you referenced up the page.
The British Monarch could assert her supremacy if she was doing it with the support of the people, eg an unpopular government that refused to call an election when their term ran out.
The American people could assert their supremacy just by sitting down and refusing to serve the rich, not much need for guns though handy if the government sicked the troops on the strikers, which his
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Hei, Russia doesn't have second amendment, explicitly bans guns and yet, for some unknown reason they too have roving street gangs, political assasinations, gangs slaughtering entire households, but I'm pretty sure that if US were to cancel the second amendment and prohibit gun ownership, then school massacres and roving street gangs would dissapear. I mean, how can you buy a gun, if you are prohibited to own it. Gangs would be forced to use baseball bats and harsh language.
Or, perhaps, it's not about gun o
Satellite and cellular Internet (Score:2)
Just not over RF broadcasts.
Then all the bad guys have to do to deny you freedom of speech is deny you wired Internet [slashdot.org]. This means you have to transmit your Internet connection over RF.
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Somebody in Australia wants a scientist exodus! (Score:4, Insightful)
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But the U.S. government is even more retarded than its Australian counterpart.
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Is that a joke? Why would educated aussies working in one of those fields want to go to the US?
There are so many better options that suggesting the US is laughable. I'll stay in Aus anyday rather than go there. If I moved, there are about a dozen better options if not more.
You keep pretending that USA is the height of humanity, burying your head in the sand and acting like an arrogant cunt works so well.
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In Europe we have great social security and we do not fight science (that much). Beside the Torys in the UK, we will not hunt you for your research. We have all kinds of weather and our food is much better. Ah yes, the content of your doctoral thesis belongs to you. Do you really need another reason to leave?
New Zealand? (Score:5, Interesting)
Meanwhile, the Kiwis are doing everything they can to build a prosperous biotechnology industry. The government has been heavily promoting a "knowledge-based economy" for nearly a decade. If you're working in Australia, trained in biotech, and would like to work with less tax, fear, and general oppression then why not leave the matrix and give NZ a go.
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Really tempting, have been considering it.
Re:New Zealand? (Score:5, Interesting)
I live in Dunedin, New Zealand.
Right now, we are faced with the closure of one of the premiere biotech facilities in the South Island, Invermay, in spite of a backlash by the farmers, scientists, and people of the region, all in the name of budget.
The country is rapidly turning into a right-wing system, we're being pummelled with fear and hate messages from our government ("Unemployed? It's not our fault for mismanaging the economy, it's not the banks fault for ruining the world economy, it's your fault because there are no jobs in the region!") Workers rights are being removed (we've just had the first employer of many back down from the now-legal removal of all of our breaks, because it suits them) at a high pace.
There's little money being pumped into research, all publicly owned assets are being flogged off (It's a New Zealand fire sale! Everything must go!) in spite of massive public opposition.
It's an ideological nightmare, and things are getting worse. Educated people are leaving because the pay and conditions here are shit.
Think twice before coming here.
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Lets go to Europe.
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Absolutely. The people are wonderful, the climate's amazing, the country is beautiful. And oh, ho ho, the sheep, the sheep! The sexiest little fluffy...WOMEN I MEANT WOMEN!
I must be reading it wrong (Score:5, Informative)
high-performance, neural, optical and fault-tolerant, computers,
electronics,
wavelength research (remember, wi-fi was ‘invented’ in Australia),
heat-shielding,
telecommunications,
information security research,
robotics,
human, animal and plant pathogens, both bacterial and viral,
fibre optics,
cryptography.
satellite technology.
sensor technology.
signal and image processing.
composite materials, andthe list could go on and on.
This effectively criminalizes half of all science related activity at colleges. It's not just the best and brightest it's literally asking the A ark to sail in some kind of reverse HHGTG parody.
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wavelength research (remember, wi-fi was ‘invented’ in Australia),
Silly me, I thought wifi was invented in 1942 by an Austrian-American woman and an American guy.
Austria and Australia do sound the same, I admit.
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Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil invented spread-spectrum communications in 1942. It's used in WiFi, but I wouldn't call that "inventing WiFi".
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That's Hedley... No, wait. It is Hedy Lamarr. Never mind.
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show some respect, Hedy was a nerd AND a movie goddess.
She's probably best recognised by geeks by her likeness (unauthorised) appearing on Corel software packaging.
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As much as I hate the patent system CSIRO DID create/invent critical parts of what Wi-Fi is today, would someone else have solved the problems had they not done so.... probably, but at the time it was them that solved them allowing for it to move forward.
Or it's a recipie for selective enforcement (Score:5, Insightful)
Whisteblowers have been sent to Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Penitentiaries under the odious Espionage Act at a higher rate under Obama than all previous presidents combined.
But Petraeus, who casually flashed Specially Compartmented Information - a much higher classification than any of the Top Secret information released by Manning to Wikilieaks - just to impress his mistress, will only face probation.
Or the cable operator who was sentenced to years in jail for carrying a Hezbollah tv channel, because it's on a State Department list of terror groups, while at the same time prominent politicians from both parties openly accepted large amounts of money from MEK [salon.com] to lobby on the group's behalf. A group also....on the State Departments list of terror groups.
So we could see the same thing in Australia. Defense contractors will be free to skirt the law and sell to any shifty customer. People who annoy the state, [wikipedia.org] though, will feel the full force of the law.
All modern law is a recipe for selective enforceme (Score:2)
If the cops aren't required to arrest everyone who commits any arrestable defense, then by definition you have selective enforcement. Our entire system of law is actually designed for it.
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Then the problems are that 1. too many offenses are arrestable, and 2. too many people arrested for whistleblowing are given prison terms.
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Cops and prosecutors don't have unlimited resources, so by definition they have to pick and chose which laws to enforce. Ideally, this means they threaten the 19 year old who gets it on with her 16 year old boyfriend with probation rather than having to register as a sex offender for the next 30 years, and instead focus on the deputy mayor who got caught slapping his wife ar
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Cops and prosecutors don't have unlimited resources, so by definition they have to pick and chose which laws to enforce.
The state doesn't have unlimited resources, so by definition it should not make laws it can't or shouldn't reasonably enforce.
Ideally, this means they threaten the 19 year old who gets it on with her 16 year old boyfriend with probation rather than having to register as a sex offender for the next 30 years, and instead focus on the deputy mayor who got caught slapping his wife around.
Alas, we know that's not how it works.
That's sounding a little Randian.
Only if you have poor reading comprehension skills.
The solution to corrupt actors within the state isn't to get rid of the state, but the corrupt actors.
Nobody suggested abolishing the state.
Smart politicians. (Score:3)
What Next? (Score:2)
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They already effectively did that 2 years ago.
We no longer have a minister for science, they butchered funding (to the point of mass layoffs) at all government agencies related to climate/weather/etc (geoscience australia, csiro, beuro of meteorology) causing thousands out of their job and entire divisions (eg: the climate change division at GA) to cease to exist.
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One time pad encryption would {#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER
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I don't think we'll be a safe haven for that kind of stuff for long... and don't look to Europe either. The whole world is turning hard right. It'll soon be the norm for scientists, activists, soldiers, and everyday citizens to be sent to psych wards and prisons for speaking the truth.
It's best to stay where you are, and fight where you are, because that's your country, and you might as well fight it at home because there will be no escape if all we do is run.
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Even our government sucks big time, we are not limited by similar rule in Germany. For example, the content of my thesis belong to me. This applies to your bachelor, masters or doctoral thesis (if you do some industrial cooperation there might be strings attached). Anyway, this might be different on this isle in the west who will reelect Cameron any day now.
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As an Australian... (Score:2)
As an Australian who grew up loving my country... I am fucking glad I left more than 5 years ago.
Australia is slowly turning to shit. :/
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False. Australia is quickly turning to shit.
I say this as an Australian still living in Australia.
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Agreed. The US is bad, but not as bad as Australia, which is why I left there.
I can deal with overly eager racist cops, lack of decent social care, lack of regulation in the market, corruption and ignorance and apathy in the general populace.
I'd much rather deal with that then the crazy censorship and rights-stripping laws the commonwealth countries are so eager to introduce.
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You could come to Europe, we ware far less fucked up (excluding the UK). We have decent health care, some market regulation, limited corruption, and demonstration going on for every this and that. We even have unions. However, we use other languages every few kilometers. So it can be also interesting to learn something new.
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How easy is it to emigrate? :)
A lot of Aussies travel freely on student/working holiday visas but those dry up once you hit 30. Unless you have a European grandmother and can thus get residency, opportunities are limited, was my impression.
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How can you say Australia is more reasonable? Look at the story you are commenting on. You think the penalties for sending an email as mention in the summary are reasonable? Really?
My comment was more general in regards to Australia and some of the laws that have been being passed and not specific to this story.
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Hey, at least we don't send people to guantanamo bay with no trial, and execute people later found innocent, spy as much on the populace as the NSA. Australia has plenty of stupidity like illustrated here, but the US shouldn't throw stones inside its glass house.
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Australia has it's own illegal detention centers and was more than happy to help out at gitmo, so that isn't the best example to use.
I very strongly disagree (Score:2)
Cutting everything other than quarrying when the mining boom is over is onion skin eating insane.
The DSGL list contains processors 40 MHz !!!!! (Score:5, Informative)
The The Defence and Strategic Goods List includea :
" “Microprocessor microcircuits”, “microcomputer microcircuits” and microcontroller microcircuits, manufactured from a compound semiconductor and operating at a clock frequency exceeding 40 MHz;
Note: 3A001.a.3. includes digital signal processors, digital array processors and digital coprocessors."
See http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/F2013C00051
CATEGORY 3 — ELECTRONICS, 3A001
I'm speechless :-(
contains processor or
The corporate hegemony known as the TPP ... (Score:2)
What a great feel-good article! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm glad to hear that someone is trying to out-stupid *my* country.
Outraged x2 (Score:4, Informative)
I'm outraged by this law, sure.
But I'm doubly outraged that I had to read on slashdot that this just passed the senate and there has been ZERO coverage of this in the mainstream media. Shame on you Fairfax, News Ltd and ABC. You went to sleep and betrayed us.
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You cannot rely on TV directly controlled by the government and even less on private news corporations. The first say what the leading party says and latter indoctrinate you in the ideas of the owners. Anyway, I am sorry for you and your country to be governed by such mean people.
Meh (Score:2)
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Now it will be all about tracking online comments and finding who in Australia posted a dual use paragraph.
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Desktop applications, like games and office tools, and enterprise applications used in businesses are not the only applications. Many more are developed for embedded systems in cars, trains, planes, machinery, houses, control systems of all sorts. In German economy the relationship between enterprise and embedded systems 8 to 20 mrd. Euro. Normally, you do not hear anything about those software systems. Anyway, this new law may cause severe damage to the scientific community in Australia. Looks like a reall
Dear australian scientists (Score:2)
if your live is in jeopardy in Australia, you might consider coming to western Europe. We do not have wild animals with bags running through the outback. However, we have a real diverse set of climates and the best of it, we are not already that rotten that we have such laws. (Please note: It might be different in the UK).
Immoral law (Score:2)
Instead of making their homework politicians try to control knowledge. Beside the fact that this ever backfired in history, it is also stupid in terms of the economy. Europe will rather sooner then later reduce its demand on coal and China is also doing it. Other natural resources are also limited and will not support the country for ever. You could see what happens to a country which has a ideological closed view of the world if you look at Venezuela. While it is important to give the poor schools and food
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The law is even stupid. What happens when the person leaves the country? Will they arrest scientists for leaving the country? This would mean that everyone in science working on security issues will now make plans for departing Australia. Especially, foreigners will think twice to stay there. And it sucks, if you cannot publish. If you cannot publish you cease to exist.
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What would you say, when they hold a "gun" to your head? They have been in a bipartisan board where one side are military guys and the government and on the other side are scientists entangled with universities and the government spending in that area. The alternative would have been total containment. That's how such things run. On one side human rights and on the other side "security" and power. In the end you have to compromise. And human rights are restricted.
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They could move to Europe.
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One thing that I can't stand is those whiners, especially those who call themselves Scientists but still prefer to non-stop whining rather than DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT
They sat already at the table with the defense guys. That law is the best they could haggle out. In democracy, you only can fix such things if you are able to alert the public to the topic. Scientist tried, but failed on that. So what they are now stating it the obvious. People who do not like that law will leave.
So they threaten that the law will drive researchers offshore ... but to where? To New Zealand? To Samoa? To Indonesia?
What about the EU? Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Poland, France, Italy? There are a couple of countries who look for talented scientist.
CSIRO (Score:2)
I mean, what kind of cool inventions have come out of Australia lately?
An anonymous comment mentioned Wi-Fi. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is responsible for at least a dozen other inventions [news.com.au].
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Bigamy is legal?