Audio and text from Lindsay's Radio Pacific Editorial, Wednesday Sept 5:

Yesterday I got home from the studio to find a flurry of panic-stricken e-mails awaiting me from organisations I regularly receive e-mail from: newsletters, opinion pieces, press releases and the like. Here’s a typical one:
 
“As you may be aware, from 5th of September 2007 anyone sending electronic messages, advertising, and promotions  will require their permission.  This is due to the new Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act.  If you are  not amenable to receiving our e-mails promoting productions, newsletter and the occasional email about other matters relating to the Industry please reply with "unsubscribe" in the subject or message area.” 
 
All were from groups I did NOT wish to unsubscribe from. They could be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars under this new legislation if I or any recipient of their e-mails withheld our permission and continued to receive their material.

At the same time there were the usual unsolicited exhortations to enlarge my penis by several feet and keep it erect all week, claim several billion dollars being held for me in a Nigerian bank account, lose 50 kg in a week, and so forth. The only spam I don’t get that apparently everyone else does is from Russian women looking for husbands. Presumably they’ve heard that would be a waste of time. In any event, none of this spam will be prevented by the legislation. Nor do I expect or ask it to be. I could avail myself of any one of countless anti-spam filters available via the free market, but I don’t bother, since they all block legitimate mail and it’s really no bother to hit the “delete” button a few times a day.

It’s just another example of Nanny State barging in where she isn’t needed, isn’t wanted and can’t do any good anyway. What she will probably do with this legislation is hammer some innocent party promoting via e-mail a position she disapproves of for breaching the law, however inadvertently. Certainly, the current Nanny is capable of that, defining as she does “electioneering” as advocacy of any position associated with a political party.

Remember what we learned yesterday—that Labour and Green members of the Health Select Committee wanted to ban any beverage except water from the workplace. This is not some Orwellian fantasy, it’s what these evil anuses actually tried to have included in the committee’s recommendations. Remember that, and remind yourself that in the light of it, Nanny is not entitled to the benefit of a single second’s doubt. She is Helengrad, she is Clarkistan, she is Comrade Cullen, she is the Muslim MP who wants to stone homosexuals to death ... she is the creeping tyranny whose Fabian trot is accelerating into a Stalinist gallop. Time she was stopped dead in her totalitarian tracks.