You think free speech is free, think again.

In a recent case, that wasted expensive court time , a lot of taxpayers dollars and ended up with a result not expected by the police prosecutor, the Judge found that a common term used by a citizen would have been heard by police at the very least in fact that they would have heard and used far worse, so in that regard he found the citizen not guilty of swearing at the police officer.

This decision has incensed the Police union and the humiliated the actual officer involved (who should have just hardened up and given the citizen a quiet polite word of advice and let it go at that) and also caused the police lobbyists in Queensland to go for gold with their efforts to have police able to defend their (ears) person from verbal abuse in the form of swearing.

It appears they have been successful because it looks like the police will from late this year or early 2011, have the power to issue on the spot $100 fines for swearing in public, and between $100 and $300 for other public nuisance offences which means they no longer need to carry the burden of proof of an offence and take the matter to court, just write out a ticket potentially raising huge amounts of revenue for the state government in the process.

The burden is then on the citizen issued with the infringement notice and fine to prove to a magistrate that they did not commit the offence, which will be pretty difficult unless you happen to be in the presence of several credible and motivated (so they will come to court and make a statement on your behalf) witnesses.

This is really becoming a police state when in a one on one encounter with police you can be fleeced on the strength of the officers say so that what you may have said was considered swearing in public.

So the question remains , what ever happened to free speech? did we actually ever have it or was it just something we imagined would be good?

In effect the legislation will make the spoken word up to the interpretation of a police officer as to whether it constitutes a public nuisance or not.

Now I'm no rocket scientist but I hardly think police are qualified to establish the context of a cuss, the syntax of a cuss within a sentence or distinguish swearing from a word in a foreign language, in fact they leave themselves wide open to racism allegations if they ticket an ethnic Australian who has a name or word that an officer thinks is a swear word, but in the ethnic language clearly is not.

You have to wonder at how soft police are getting when they can't get over the fact that a judge decided that they should be used to hearing words like "prick" from the general public and that it was not offencive for a citizen to call a police person by that term.

I think Bligh is on a winner with this one because people swear all the time, and think nothing of it, in fact it's part of every tradies vocabulary if you go onto a building site.

I'm not in any way advocating that we as a society accept swearing as part of our daily verbose, or that we remove the unspoken rule that we keep it for the boys, but this seems over the top and another revenue raiser to me.


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