Wake Up and Smell the Police State

Well Well Well....

Bet you thought that this stuff only happened in South America or Iran or the Eastern Bloc.

While we sit around smugly self-satisfied and ruminate on our avowed mission of bringing the Holy Grail (aka Western Democracy) to the miserable oppressed buggers of the world, we pay precious little attention to what is happening here...

It is time to wake up and smell the police state.

Bill Henson, certainly a confrontational artist has had his exhibition in Sydney suspended, 20 of his 41 photos seized and it looks like either he or someone else will be charged with publishing an indecent article. To contextualise, Henson takes photos of young pre or early pubescent children and they are nudes.

Which apparently means porn... kiddy porn.

Not that he hasn't been open about the subject matter; not that it isn't consensual and by that I mean he talks with and gets consent of his models' parents; not that his pictures don't sexualise children... nudity and sex are not the same thing.

Unless you are a conservative philistine or Kevin Rudd (which may be the same thing we have yet to see). In which case naked children are always sexual, always pornographic, always "revolting".

Here's me thinking that that attitude says more about their depravity than Henson's.


Just to note on the day this story broke your favourite newspaper and mine, the Daily Telegraph was running an online poll about this. Over 75% of Tele readers said that Henson's work was porn and if you thought differently you were warped (their phrasing not mine), which is all the proof I need dear reader to declare that Henson's pics MUST be art!