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Second Bennelong Institute Event
The second Bennelong Institute event is on Tuesday 30 March, at 7pm. There topic is the Free Trade Agreement, and there will be two speakers: Michael Baume, and journalist Stephen Long.
The event will be at the Epping Boys High School Library, Vimera Rd, Epping.
So how do you get this guy to shut up?
The presenters were very interesting, although it was difficult to get Michael Baume to stick to reasonable amounts of time in answering questions at the end, and he didn't seem to understand my question regarding the lock-in effect of extending copyright and the effect of the 6 month notice rule (or perhaps, in true politician style, he understood but didn't like the question and so pretended not to understand it). He also took a massively partisan approach to his presentation. To listen to him you might think the FTA is an all singing, all dancing, miracle document without flaws. Eat a page and it will cure your paraplegia, my boy, yes sirree.
While Michael Baume was getting stuck into the media for giving an unbalanced view of the FTA, I thought Stephen Long's presentation was far more balanced. He discussed the good and the bad, including the issues with chapter 17, which, despite his protests that he is not a lawyer, he clearly understood very well - his only real error in this regard being that he mentioned Sony v Stevens as being a case about DVDs and a DVD player, when it was really about games on the Sony PlayStation series.
Bloody good talk
The talk was interesting, and as a student it was not only interesting but was amusing.