Sam's Insane Ravings

Indonesia is in a lose-lose situation.

The Bali bombing trial is something that the Australian media, and the Government has a great deal of interest in. Of course they both demand a guilty verdict and execution of the accused. Can you imagine the uproar in the Australian media if the verdict was Not Guilty?

Now imagine if they accused got off on a technicality.

I for one hope the court rules the charges invalid, since any other option is too scary for Indonesia.

The charges have been made under decrees made by the Indonesian President. President Megawati had to use her powers to issue decrees because the Parliament wouldn't pass an anti-terrorism bill.

Being charged under a Presidential decree which was made after the act you are accused of committing occurred is quite obviously unfair. The precedent of being convicted of a crime for doing something that wasn't a crime at the time you did it is very scary. The Indonesian constitution of course explicitly doesn't allow such retrospective laws, but of course constitutions are things to be ignored on this War on Terror.

For Indonesia the stakes are even higher then just basic fairness and human rights.

The decrees give the the police (and the military via them) the powers they showed they can't be trusted with during the 33 year reign of Suharto's New Order. That a Judge needs to OK some of the the measures is not a useful check and balance since the Indonesian Judiciary has shown itself as not having the courage to stand up to the military (see the acquittal of the police and army officers charged over the whole East Timor rampage).

The only good result for Indonesia is for the court to find the decree unconstitutional and hence the accused bombers not guilty of violating laws that didn't exist at the time of the bombings. Of course the weak judiciary in Indonesia is unlikely to do such a thing.

Instead Indonesian will most likely be stuck with the seeds of the next oppressive military regime as their President bows to the wishes of America's war on terror.

Of course the Australian Government thinks that's a wonderful thing.

It's not like blowing up a building full of people wasn't already illegal under existing laws anyway.

One of the web sites I occasionally look at now uses AntiAdBuster Pro which doesn't like me not having Javascript turned on.

Oh well one less web site to waste my time one. Maybe everyone will start using it and I'll actually get some work done.

Is George W. Bush pulling off peace in the Middle East.

Of course it isn't going to happen, the extremists on both sides will see to that - expect some more carnage just at the wrong time.

And a parliamentary committee in the UK is to investigate whether the Government lied about those WMD in Iraq. In the US multiple investigations into just who did the lieing are beginning.

While in Australia, the Government accuses the ABC of having an anti-American bias as evidenced by them not being gung-ho war nuts. And the Opposition twidles their thumbs and worries about who will get to lead the opposition for the next decade.

Either I'm completely out of the loop, or those so called movie marathon geeks are mere imposters for not organising to see a movie marathon almost certain to send you to schizophrenia land.

Sure it says VIC only, but what are the chances that Victoria also has cinemas known as Broadway, Penrith & Warringah Mall.

I saw the second Matrix movie tonight, I wrote a very little review thing which should be in the Movies section. I won't repeat it here.

I also picked up St. Anger the new Metallica album, which Utopia started selling at midnight, and since I was in the area I picked one up at around 1:30.

Sydney University is getting more and more concerned about music copying. I guess because the evil record companies are going to go through the University's computers with a fine tooth comb. Reading through University emails would be a damn depressing job...

Today I finally stored a bunch of mp3 files in my account on the staff/pgrad/hons/mit machines. The problem is they have names like:

$ ls -l | head -11
total 201600
-rw-r--r--    1 sholden  pgrad      878202 Jun  4 21:32 BIRM_01_128.mp3
-rw-r--r--    1 sholden  pgrad     6436812 Jun  4 21:31 BIRM_02_128.mp3
-rw-r--r--    1 sholden  pgrad     5726244 Jun  4 21:31 BIRM_03_128.mp3
-rw-r--r--    1 sholden  pgrad     5287560 Jun  4 21:31 BIRM_04_128.mp3
-rw-r--r--    1 sholden  pgrad     4682910 Jun  4 21:31 BIRM_05_128.mp3
-rw-r--r--    1 sholden  pgrad     7951356 Jun  4 21:31 BIRM_06_128.mp3
-rw-r--r--    1 sholden  pgrad     5281722 Jun  4 21:31 BIRM_07_128.mp3
-rw-r--r--    1 sholden  pgrad     8501796 Jun  4 21:31 BIRM_08_128.mp3
-rw-r--r--    1 sholden  pgrad     5585298 Jun  4 21:31 BIRM_09_128.mp3
-rw-r--r--    1 sholden  pgrad    12075486 Jun  4 21:30 BIRM_10_128.mp3

I grabbed these off the web with wget, which I assume sets the timestamp on the file to be the timestamp reported for the URL by the web server. If so, why the hell did the person adding these files to the server copy them in reverse order (this pattern continues for all the files not just the first 10)?

I should probably name them to what they actually contain in order to assist the people looking for this stuff. BIRM_02_128.mp3, for example, should be named Metallica, Birmingham 6 Oct 96 - Creeping Death.mp3.

Of course I'm allowed to possess these files. I'm not violating copyright laws. I'm not even violating university copyright policies. I'm sure those files are on the P2P networks, and can be grabbed by anyone who knows the URLs from a website (there is no authentication, which made using wget easy for once). Downloading them like that would be risky from a copyright perspective. Buying CDs (not that there are any) and ripping them yourself would also be illegal (in Australia, not in countries with saner copyright laws). I however, bought a CD which pointed me to a website (and gave me a software style registration number) which let me download the mp3s. That CD is marketted by Universal Music Australia (under license from Universal International Music, in turn under license from Metallica) so that is permission in my book.

There is no explicit licensing terms (that I can find), there's a link called Terms of Use but it goes to website privacy waffle. There is the following sentence though:

Stream it, download it, burn it do whatever the fuck you want with the music it's ours to give and now it's yours to take.

From The Band

Whatever the fuck you want sounds to me like I could put them up on my university web page. Which I wouldn't do anyway, because 280MB of music is not what the University want (or should be paying for the bandwidth) to host.

In fact I've only got the files there because I actually listen to them on occassions and they don't fit on my flash drive thingy.

I managed to play an hour or two (OK maybe 3...) of GTA: Vice City. It's a great game, the in car radio is brilliant. It gets the 80s feel down pat, and throws in gobs of humour (the talk stations are really funny, but of course the short loop makes them short term). I didn't play it for long, but the VROCK station plays basically what I listened to in the 80s with a song each from Twisted Sister, Quiet Riot, Ozzy Osbourne, Iron Maiden, Anthrax, David Lee Roth, Slayer, Megadeath, and Motley Crue.

Hearing Slayer's Raining Blood again, means that's a game I'll be buying as soon as I actually own a machine fast enough to play it...

In the restricted domain of web browsers, there used to be one feature that I found impossible to live without after having used it. Type ahead find.

Now there is another: Flash click to view.

Flash is one of those things which is occassionaly used well (for animations, for example) but mostly is used to present extremely annoying garbage.

So now you can have the good without the bad (and without annoying download plugin requests...).

If this is at sam.holden.id.au, then the DNS changes have propogated to your part of the internet (changes I haven't actually made at this point), and I managed to not break the code in the 30 minutes I spent converting it yet again.

The code has now transitioned from php->mod_perl->cgi/perl, and will hopefully go back to mod_perl if that starts working at the new home.

So now I have hosting that will hopefully be able to run a nameserver competently, so I don't have days like this:

I honestly don't care too much about my website having great uptime. I also have the IP address noted to DNS failing is only a small inconveniance to me. Except for the fact that mail gets delayed (obviously) when it is down, and Anna doesn't know the IP and hence can't check her mail.

So I decided to upgrade, and hopefully this provider will be more competent. So far there has been an initial with a bad install of mysql - which has been fixed promptly enough for my purposes. And a non-working mod_perl, which really doesn't matter (though would have saved me 30 minutes). We'll see over the next few months.

So now I'm spending $4.50 a month (which will go up and down with the exchange rate) on web/mail hosting. I get ssh with this one, so I'm moving up in this hosting world thing. Of course with the money I'm prepared to pay, I don't expect 100% uptime and instant support so don't be suprised if this site still goes up and down (though hopefully it'll be better than the last 6 months).

So if something is broken, chances are I screwed up the code. Though I might have just forgotten to transfer an important file, or change a setting.

Update: of course the one DNS entry I typoed was for sam.holden.id.au...

A 35-year-old man was reportedly holding a glass of 96-percent proof Polish vodka in his hand when he put a cigarette between his lips and tried to light it with his other hand.

Vodka-sipping barfly goes up in flames

Firstly percent proof doesn't make sense. The universe was nice enough to arrange the chemistry of water, alcohol, and gunpowder such that a spirit with X% alcohol is 2X proof. Clearly Japanese journalists do as little fact checking as Australian journalists.

But that's not my reason for quoting from this article, the reason is in this gem:

Fire department officials said under the Fire Service Law, any liquor of 60-percent proof or over is designated as a "dangerous material" and that four similar accidental fires were reported in the Japanese capital from 1994 to 2000.

"When you are under the influence of alcohol your ability to make decisions quickly is hampered, so we expect this kind of incident to happen again," a spokesman for the fire department said. Specifically, the department wants liquor importers to put a big "Danger" label on bottles of hard liquor.

Vodka-sipping barfly goes up in flames

There were four cases of such alcohol fires in seven years and they want to stick warning labels on the bottles!

Now alcohol is involved in about 4000 traffic deaths a year in Japan. 7000 times as many deaths as their are non-fatal (I assume, since they didn't mention any) accidents with vodka catching fire. But it's far more important to put a danger, inflammable warning on the bottles, then to put a don't drive you idiot warning. Obviously comparing fires in Tokyo with fatalities in the whole of Japan isn't fair, but I can't be bothered finding alcohol related traffic injuries in tokyo statistics...

Japan consumes 6.7 litres of spirits per person per year (you'll have to select Japan in the form and submit it, since it doesn't like linking to the result page). Just consider just how many people there are in Japan (109 million over the age of 15). What a great idea. Put 7 billion or so danger, inflammable labels on bottles each decade to try and prevent the 5 or 6 people who accidently start fires when they are drunk each decade.

The Navy at one point in the mid-1990s experienced a 10 percent pregnancy rate for women on six-month sea tours and looked at policies to discourage pregnancies while assigned to ships.

Marine had baby on ship in war zone - washingtontimes.com

Homosexual women don't often get pregnant (at least not without trying to). Homosexual men don't often get women pregrant. So might I suggest encouraging homosexuality amongst navy personnel as a policy to discourage pregnancies.

It's not like the Navy is renowned for its heterosexualness anyway :)

They could, for example, create a policy in which heterosexual behaviour was worthy of discharge and those being overt about it would be sacked. Of course they wouldn't require people to declare themselves not heterosexual since that would be discriminatory. However, those heterosexuals who sneak in would be expected not to mention their heterosexualness to anyone.

They could call it something like Don't ask. Don't tell. After all pregnancies adversely affect the moralle and effectiveness of the troops.

Since it's $2.95 for a new release at the local video store on Wednesdays I went and hired The Animatrix.

Pleasantly enough it wasn't all what I class as Anime, some of it was actually watchable animation.

Of course it adds even more evidence to the the real world is another matrix theory. Since nothing else could explain the complete disregard for basic physics taken even further than in the damn films. That the world is a simlulation is the only explanation I can come up with to explain the completely different laws of physics that seem to apply.

Or alternatively, the writers are idiots. Or at least uncreative (I can come up with multiple reasons for the machines to keep humans plugged into a simulation which don't involve violating the basics of science, and I'm not particularly creative).

Further evidence for the idiot theory, is that some complete idiot, who I hope never works in video ever again, decided it would be a good idea to have the subtitles randomly shift from below to above the picture and back again. Honestly, how stupid do you have to be to think that might be a good idea, let alone actually do it and not notice how much it sucks.

A third of the American public believes U.S. forces have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a recent poll. Twenty-two percent said Iraq actually used chemical or biological weapons.

...

Pollsters and political analysts offer several reasons for the gaps between facts and beliefs: the public's short attention span on foreign news, fragmentary or conflicting media reports that lacked depth or skepticism, and Bush administration efforts to sell a war by oversimplifying the threat.

War poll uncovers fact gap - philly.com

I'm betting the actual reason is that at least 50% of Americans are plain old stupid. Dumb. Slow. Idiotic. Moronic.

And I don't mean below average, since obviously 50% are below the average. I mean braindead stupid. Would be out thought by a goldfish stupid.

Mr Ruddock's spokesman said the minister received between 3000 and 4000 applications a year, and did not have time to read the files, which were 10 to 20 centimetres thick, even in cases in which he decided to overturn rulings.

So many visa files, so little time to read - SMH

This is the minister who is ever so proud of his hands on approach, and has used his ministerial powers of intervention at an unprecedented rate. Possibly the reason former ministers have used those powers on fewer occassions is because they actually didn't use them without fully reviewing the available material. I guess it's much easier to count the political party donation than it is to read files and reports.

Mr Howard says an inquiry would be premature and more time is needed to uncover the weapons in Iraq.

"We didn't massage the intelligence, we didn't tell the agencies to tell us what we wanted to hear," he said.

"They gave us their honest assessment and their assessment was that Iraq had that capability.

"It's all together too early to be running into these things now and it think it is driven by political opportunism not a genuine search for the truth."

Labor keeps up pressure on WMD intelligence - ABC Online

I understand that politicians are self serving scum who only care about themselves. I still find it amazing that people put up with this crap. There is lots of evidence that intelligence reports were not just mistaken but possibly intentionally misleading. At least some of the reports originating from the UK and the USA are looking very dodgy.

Now there are only four options:

1. The government lied about the advice it recieved.
2. The government pressured the intelligence agencies into lieing.
3. The intelligence agencies are incompetent and can't spot obvious falsehoods.
4. Everything worked perfectly (incorrect intelligence is to be expected on occassions, mistakes aren't good but can't be avoided entirely).

The last option is very unlikely, due to past events like intelligence officers resigning in protest and Britain's infamous dossier.

The first two options should be of major concern to the Australian public, a Government which decides to go to war knowing the the reasons are invalid is not what we want. Even die hard Liberal supporters should want to know about this, since if that is the case it is time for the Liberals to change their leadership team.

The third option justifies an enquiry all by itself. If our intelligence organisations are completely incompetent we need to find out about it and fix it. "War on terror" junkies should be particularly worried about this one. Maybe there's a nuclear bomb being planted in Sydney as I type - and our intelligence organisations are too incompetent to notice.

The first two options are damaging to the Government and I can understand them not wanting those exposed. The third option is bad for the Government but is the type of thing that can be used to win an election (see the Queensland state election and corruption in the state Labor party as an example of how to spin such things). The fourth option is great for the Government, everything worked as it should and they made the "tough decisions".

The fact that the Government doesn't want an investigation means I know which two options I suspect are closer to the truth.

Of course, the Government is confident of winnning the next election (for obvious polling reasons). Not having an enquiry now, could be a disaster if Labor wins the next election. From a political persepective it would provide an opportunity to take down what by then would probably be the "greatest" Liberal PM in history. A royal commission might even be an option. Heck why not pursue war crimes...

Of course that will never happen, politicians being self serving scums, don't do duch things. They know that the roles will change in the future and they don't want the favour returned.

Politicians - the achilles heel of democracy (well that and mob rule).

I just spent five hours writing.

My thesis is now one, yes one, paragraph longer.

Scratch that. It now hasn't changed since that one paragaph was crap...

I so trump this old yvan entry.

An Italian doctor who warned police that a bomb had been planted on an Alitalia plane last week says his phone call was a mere hoax and insists he had no idea there were any explosives on board.

Love-sick doctor admits to sparking bomb alert - ABC News Online

Oops!

"I've done something terribly stupid," said the doctor, who insisted he had no idea there was a bomb on board, or who could have planted it.

Love-sick doctor admits to sparking bomb alert - ABC News Online

terribly stupid might be a bit understated.

Of course he could also have saved a plane load of people from dieing in a plane crash (though the article doesn't really define what the bomb was).

He better hope he has a good alibi and not have associated with suspected terrorists ever.

Of course if he was smart he'd be claiming God told him, and God also told him no one would believe him so best to do an anonymous warning. Then he could start selling revelation to religious nuts.

And as an aside, in the background Rikki Lake is on the TV, with a guest who has just been told by her husband/boyfriend/whatever that he's been cheating on her said You told me on the wrong show, it should be Jerry Springer or words to that effect. Then she went a little Jerry Springer on him. I love weekday lunch time TV.

Rivers And Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time is on the TV at the moment. Andy Goldsworthy is just plain brilliant, though I like sculpture so I'm a little biased.

Creating sculpture out of icicles which then melt away, out of wood on the rocks in the low tide which will be flooded by the high tide is cool. Flowers and leaves floating in a river. Eggs made from rocks in a field slowly being covered by the growth of plants, and then revealed again as they fall back, and then covered by snow. And winding walls of stone.

Part of the point I guess is that stone isn't as lasting and permanent as it appears. Anyway I love art which is temporal in nature. Throwing a ball of ochre into a river that you've spent hours grinding from rocks gathered from the river because of the patterns and flows and forms it makes is great. Throwing a handful of the dust you spent hours grinding into the air for the same effect but for even less lasting effect is even better.

The camera work is also very good all on its own.

I love question time.

Of course it's annoying when question time is wasted with stupid pat-on-the-back questions and answers within a party, but that goes with the territory. It's even more annoying when politicians blatantly don't answer simple questions and rant about some unrelated garbage in order to attack the questioner or their party.

Then there is the fact the it seems that Government ministers must include in every answer they make "under the previous Labor Government <something bad>" or "we inheritied <something bad> from the previous Labor Government". Why a government can't stand on its own record and not have to highlight everything the previous government did wrong I will never understand. Of course all sides of politics are guilty of doing this - though the current Government seems to be taking it to new heights. Of course that's mostly Labor's fault, since they have refused to defend themselves against the criticism of their economic management.

Yes, under Labor there were amaxingly high interest rates for a time, there was an amazing level of dent, the current account wasn't brilliant, etc, etc. For some reason the current Labor party just hides when this is brought up (which is a lot) rather than at least mentioning that that was the price that needed to be paid for the economic reform they were doing at the time. A significant factor in the current government's economic goodness, is the payoff from the economic reform done under Labor - Labor where stupid enough to pay the price and let their opponents pick up the benefits. Of course Keating also screwed things up mightily by chasing the European monetary policy approach and not allowing for interest rate lead times - but it wasn't all bad.

Our political system doesn't seperate the Legislative and the Executive roles, the way the American system (with its seperate Presidential elections) does. Our system has some deficiencies due to that. For example, you may think that the Coalition government is preferable to a Labor government for some policy reason. However, you may also think that the local Labor candidate is the best choice for the job of local member. Under the American system you could actually vote seperately on each of those roles. Under out system they are merged into the one vote, and so you have to decide which part you think is more imporant.

The benefit of this (which in my opinion far outweighs the cost) is that question time is wonderfully entertaining. The Government is in parliament. The people who are making the executive decisions and policies have to face the opposition in parliament. Under the American system that isn't the case, the President doesn't have to sit in Congress and answer questions. What makes question time so entertaining is that the Government gets grilled over any little hint of a mistake - it's wonderful television, and well worth the reduction in choice and democracy...

Up with his we will not put.

Governor General Designate Major-General Michael Jeffrey, on community attitudes to peadophilia (on TV just now)

Oh great, now we'll have Yoda as Governor General. Well half Yoda anyway (Yoda would be up with this put we will not).

And on an unrelated note, I get the number one hit on googling for sam holden. Finally. And I didn't have to murder anyone. Of course it won't last, so I still might have to take extreme measures.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual leader of the world's Anglicans, said yesterday he raised no objection to the appointment of a gay clergyman as a bishop in England.

Credibility at stake, warns Archbishop of Canterbury - SMH

For a liberal, my opinion on this is very conservative. My one sentence opinion is: Jeffrey John should not be part of the clergy let alone a bishop.

He is openly gay. That's not a problem, and people who maintain it is are hypocritical bigots. There are two schools of thought on homosexual behaviour - either it is a sin or it isn't. Either way being homosexual shouldn't disqualify someone from being clergy.

Obviously those in the not a sin school won't have problem with homosexual clergy. Those in the is a sin school shouldn't have a problem either. Is drunkenness a sin? Can an alcoholic be clergy? I'd say yes and yes, as long as the alcoholic is abstaining from alcohol.

He had a previous homosexual relationship for 27 years. That's not a problem either. Prior sins do not disqualify one from being clergy. If those sins are regarded badly by the general community they can restrict what you should be doing. For example, someone who was once an athiest shouldn't be disqualified from the clergy even though they have sinned in the past. Someone who was once a paedophile shouldn't be disqualified from the clergy even though they have sinned in the past - obviously the community will demand they don't run the sunday school though.

So then we get to the actual problem:

For some reason this group of clergy are cross with John, as he has shown no 'remorse' over his relationship, although John now says that he's celibate.

Could Anglican Church split over gay bishop? - gay.com UK

The opinion of the author of that quote is obvious from the "for some reason" words. However, this is the problem. Repentance of sin is the fundamental basis of Christianity. Past sins are OK as long as repentance has occured. If repentance has not then the person is still in sin. Obviously this is a very religious point of view, but no mainstream Christian is going to argue that repentance isn't essential. Note that repentance doesn't have to involve actions (the Catholic sacrament of penance is not universal among christian churches) but is a requirement of forgiveness and grace.

So then the issue becomes is having a homosexual relationship a sin?

Obviously I think yes. However, this doesn't necessarily mean I think that a homosexual relationship in itself is sinful (I'm sitting on the fence on that one for the moment). I do think that sexual relations outside of marriage are. Since I'm certain there were no Anglician homosexual marriages 27 years ago, I'm certain that Jeffrey John wasn't married.

There has been at least one Anglican homosexual marraige. Of course that caused just as much conflict as this affair (within the Anglican circles anyway - the rest of the world probably doesn't care much). Clearly many people do not think homosexual marriages are valid - and hence they must consider all homoxesual sex to be sinful (since it's outside of marriage). Others think homosexual marriages are fine - and hence they must consider homosexual sex within those unions to be OK.

Jeffrey John shouldn't be a member of clergy since he is unrepentant of obvious sin.

However, he said: "If an openly gay person, committed to that chaste, sexually abstinent lifestyle can't be welcomed (as a bishop) well frankly there's no hope for gay and lesbian people in the life of the church.

Credibility at stake, warns Archbishop of Canterbury - SMH

I disagree with that. The problem here isn't that he is openly gay. The problem is that he is unrepentant. Of course many of the people against him being a bishop are against it because he is gay pure and simple. Those people are incorrect in my opinion, in their reasoning but not their conclusion.

Of course this is the sort of thing that churches split over, but in this case I think it's clear cut. After all consider this case:

Someone who is heterosexual and had an unmarried relationship for 27 years but is now celibate. He doesn't think the relationship was sinful, and hence isn't repentant. Should he be a bishop? I say no.

You can argue that since the church didn't allow homosexual marriages he had no choice and considered himself married. I don't buy that though. If his church doesn't allow something he has to follow that rule (while campaigning for change), or leave the church and find one that agrees with his interpretation.

Well not a slippery slope in fact, but an illogical contradiction destined to be the cause of major future problems.

"I recommend that New South Wales legislate to introduce the offence of 'child destruction' relating to a criminal act causing a child, capable of being born alive, to die before it has an existence independent of its mother," Judge Finlay's report said.

Killing unborn child: NSW to consider new law - SMH

The conflict with abortion should be obvious. Of course this is nothing new, the most famous example is probably California's decades old law.

The NSW Crimes Act has a law against abortion, it makes unlawful use of any drug or instrument to bring about an abortion a felony punishable by 10 years gaol. As with all legal matters the devil is in the details, and the word unlawful provides some leeway, and that leeway has been used to essentially nullify the entire thing.

In the USA they have Roe vs Wade, which being a Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of a law, is as constant and everlasting as it gets in American law. That doesn't mean it can't be changed, but it would require a change to the constitution (there is no chance of that happening) or another Supreme Court decision (which is quite possible with the current conservative climate in the US judiciary). Roe vs Wade trumps anything a state can do, and hence California's law does not apply to abortions - essentially it isn't murder if the mother does it or authorises it...

In Australia things are different. There is no authoritative ruling. What we have is a ruling by the Supreme Court of Victoria in 1969, in whch Justice Menhennitt held that for an abortion to be performed unlawfully, the Crown must establish either the accused did not honestly believe on reasonable grounds that the act done by him was necessary to preserve the woman from a serious danger to her life or physical or mental health (not being merely the normal dangers of pregnancy and childbirth) which the continuance of the pregnancy would entail; or the act done by him was in the circumstances proportionate to the need to preserve the woman from a serious danger as above..

This was then taken by Justice Levine in the NSW District Court in 1972 who added that economic or social reasons provide grounds for a danger to the mother's health.

Then in 1995 Justice Kirby (why does his name crop up in basically everything that matters) in the NSW Court of Appeal essentially held that abortion on demand was accepted.

That case (CES vs SuperClinics) reached the High Court of Australia on appeal but was sadly settled before a decision was made. Hence there is no authorative ruling.

Every abortion performed in NSW between 1972 and 1995 that wasn't necessary to preserve the mother's life or health from something not normal in pregnancy was relying on a District Court decision. Doctors performing those abortions were mighty brave.

And every abortion after that is still based on a NSW Supreme Court decision, a far cry the highest court in the land decision of Roe vs Wade in America.

A change in the law could easily make abortion on demand illegal in NSW. Since the reason it is legal at the moment is just a court decision based on the current wording of the law itself. It isn't a constitutional issue, as in the USA.

Making child destruction (the term should be feotus and not child) a crime is going make abortion a much greyer area than it already is.