Over 4 million Australian households don't have to think of the children

 

In 2001 people living alone made up a quarter of all Australian households and in 2006 there were also 1.6 million couples without dependant children in the house, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

 

That means there are over 4 million Australian households without children and this number is growing annually according to the statistics.

 

Why then is the Rudd Government going to force the internet users among them into a mandatory national filtering scheme which is supposedly aimed at protecting children using Teh Internetz?

 

Do Kevin Rudd and Stephen Conroy seriously think that bands of feral ankle biters and teen geeks are going on home invasion sprees to access the world wide web in these otherwise childless homes?

 

 

Deadlines in the Australian Censorship War

 

Stephen Conroy apparently told the BBC that The filter laws will be introduced in parliament in August 2010 and will take a year to implement.

 

The Australian Electoral Commission states that:

• The earliest possible date for a joint House/Senate election is Saturday, 7 August 2010.
• The earliest possible date for a House of Representatives election is any Saturday, 33 days after dissolution of House.
• The earliest possible date for a Senate election is Saturday, 7 August
• The latest possible date for a joint House/Senate election is Saturday, 16 April 2011.
• The latest possible date for a House of Representatives election is Saturday, 16 April 2011.
• The latest possible date for a Senate election is *Saturday, 21 May 2011.

It is possible that the Communications Minister is being a little cute with his August 2010 date for the introduction of legislation.

 

If a federal election occurs in early August this year, Conroy would be introducing the Internet censorship legislation hot on the heels of this election (if the Rudd Government is re-elected). This possibility would obviously raise the proposed legislation's visibility during the preceding election campaign, with faith-based lobby groups swinging in behind the Labor re-election campaign in an attempt to ensure passage of the bill.

 

The latest possible election date would see Conroy still rolling out his compulsory national filtering scheme, but most Australian ISPs would probably be actively engaged in blocking blacklisted sites by then. This would result in a significant number of voters using the Internet going into polling booths very disgruntled with the Labor Party.

 

Any polling date between August 2010 and April/May 2011 would see political waters muddied by vigorous debate over details in the Rudd Government's censorship legislation or practical problems with the initial filtering roll-out.

 

Given the fact that this minister obviously holds to the popular political perception that having the Christian Right on your side is an advantage and has previously displayed a penchant for hiding pertinent policy details from the electorate prior to an election and then claiming a mandate for action immediately afterwards, it would appear that Senator Conroy may be hoping for an August 2010 federal election.

 

Either way, this leaves Australian citizens opposed to the Rudd Government's plan with only six months to make their opposition felt in the corridors of power.

What Rudd & Conroy attempt to censor now on the Australian Internet

 

The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy keeps saying that the only material the Rudd Government intends to ban from view on the Australian Internet is material that is actually Refused Classification.

In fact he told a Senate estimates committee on 26 May 2009 that the focus of our policy has always been refused classification, RC.

He also says that the aim of this nationwide censorship is to stop the digital transmission of child pornography and to prevent children accidentally seeing pornography from anywhere in the world on the their computers.

 

Leaving aside the fact that the Australian Senate already blocks senators from accessing a wide range of material when using their government Internet accounts, including at least one online newspaper which is not in the RC category, what exactly is Senator Conroy and his department banning right now on com.au websites?

 

Here's one small nugget of information:

Question No: 208 Program No. 1.2 Hansard Ref: ECA33 and ECA34 (26/5/09)

Topic: ACMA BLACKLIST

Senator Ludlam asked:

What proportion of the current ACMA Blacklist consists of RC material?

Answer:

At 30 April 2009, 51 per cent of URLs on the list provided access to content that had been, or would likely to have been, classified RC by the Classification Board.

 

Notice that the 51% mentioned includes material that hasn't actually been formally assessed for Refused Classification by the Australian Classification Board? Apparently staffers at ACMA just know in their little hearts what is not fit for viewing when that member of the public complaint lobs on their desk.

Also notice that 49% of the government ACMA blacklist is not even capable of being passed off as "likely to have been" classified as RC if it had been formally assessed?

If you delve a bit deeper you will find Senator Conroy stating that only about 30% of the Refused Classification segment of this blacklist is made up of URLs which lead to child pornography content or similar.

 

So what exactly is the mysterious 49% of the current ACMA blacklist composed of if it doesn't include material containing depictions of child sexual abuse, bestiality, strong nudity, implied sexual activity, fetishes, drug use or violence, very frequent or very strong coarse language, illegal activity such as detailed instructions in euthanasia methods and other material that is strong in impact? All of which ACMA apparently includes in this RC category. Well, that is something we may never know as this is a s*e*c*r*e*t [Sssssh!] blacklist with no truly independent scrutiny of its accuracy and compliance with legislation or regulations.

 

And what does the 49% represent as a hard number? At the moment it probably means that there are in the vicinity of 479 websites/pages on the blacklist which would contain content which is likely to be perfectly legal across Australia if it were available in printed form or on DVD.

We all know to our collective amusement that in the recent past the ACMA list contained a Queensland dental practice website.

 

I have to wonder how many of these banned URLs are quite innocuous, apart from holding and publishing opinions critical of those things which fundamentalist Christians and the likes of Senator Conroy hold dear.

I also have to wonder just how many freelance journalists and citizen bloggers will end up on this blacklist as it expands under mandatory filtering of the Australian Internet.

The Rudd Government's not censoring the Australian Internet - it's censoring older people

 

If you read Rudd Government bumpf on the need for Internet censorship and all that nonsense which Senator Conroy mouths, it would be easy to believe that Australian users are mostly innocent children and evil paedophiles just waiting to prey on these sweet innocents.

 

Small problem with this premise though.

 

Australian Internet users are mainly adults over 35 years of age (66.3% in all and mostly female) and the biggest proportion of these adults are over 55 years of age according to one 2007 snapshot.

In 2008 Nielsen said that Australians were spending almost 14 hours a week surfing the Net (out of a total of 84.4 media consumption hours) with 94% of all users accessing the Internet from home, and by March 2009 it was reporting that our individual media consumption was averaging 89.7 hours per week with the biggest slice of this being our Internet use. 

By 2009 the CIA World Fact Book calculated that over 15 million Australians use the Internet.

 

Now it's not hard to guess that techno-savvy, usually computer literate from an early age, individuals will be able to circumvent any national filter at will - the Enex report to the Dept. of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy even tells us so.

It's also not hard to realise that older users rely almost solely on the expertise of the big search engines (which are currently not universally filtered for Australian use) to find their way to online information and opinion.

 

Which leaves the planned mandatory national ISP-level filtering scheme censoring people rather than cyberspace and most of those people with artificially limited access to information and free speech will be middle-aged and older voters.

 

Potentially making at least 10 million Australians very ticked off with Kevin Rudd and the Labor Government ahead of the next federal election.

 

I'm one of these, Senator Conroy! I'm not impressed that, having fairly successfully spanned technology which moved from sloping school desks with ink wells and nibbed wooden pens right through to today's cyberspace, you and your Labor Right cronies are trying to tell me that I'm to have restricted access to the world.

 

Guess where my vote won't be going?

Let's just get a few things straight, Ms. Lundy

 

Senator Kate Lundy has been blogging about how it was always Labor's intention to have a mandatory national internet filter in place.

Er, this is what your ******* policy actually said 'Labor will provide a mandatory 'clean feed' internet service for all homes, schools and public computers that are used by Australian children' and afterwards this is what your ******* Communications Minister said 'anyone wanting uncensored access to the internet will have to opt out of the service'.

So despite using both quotes to show that all was really rosy in Gulag Australis no matter  what those nasty nerds were saying, she's very conveniently overlooked the tiny weeny circumstance that this policy applied to Internet connections to which children, I repeat C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N, had access and ignored the fact that voters have much longer memories and some can clearly recall phoning Conroy's Canberra office and being told that there would definitely be an opt-out facility if national Internet filtering was introduced.

And despite trying to slide out from under the heaped scorn coming from the general public, Lundy is giving her unqualified support to The Great Webbit Proof Fence Lundy plans to advocate an approach that recognises the openess principle but she says she will be bound by Labor Caucus' position on the matter.

I wonder if the senator remembers that it's an Australia-wide electorate which gets to vote her in or out of the Upper House?

 

Hey, Mista Conroy!

 

#This is a great idea. So here goes on my first post.#

 

A letter to Senator Stephen Conroy, Chief Censor of Australia

 

Dear Senator,

 

When you announced Labor's internet policy during the last gasps of the 2007 federal election campaign you weren't telling Australian voters the truth.

In fact, the swiftness with which you changed the policy from opt-in/out to mandatory internet filtering by all Australian Internet Service Providers shows that you were probably consciously lying from the start.

I have read all your statements in the Senate and committee, looked at every ministerial press release and most of the comments you have made in the media, I even downloaded the reports on internet filtering and closely examined the details.

So I know that you are trying to sell Australian voters a wowser's mongrel pup.

I'm not going to get angry, I'm going to get even.

I will speak with each and every relative eligible to vote in the next round of council/state/federal elections and do my best to convince them not to vote for any candidate associated with the Labor Party.

I won't agrue my case on the basis of censorship - I'll pick the issue each relative is most concerned about and white ant your authoritarian regime that way.

 

Well and Truly Teed Off

Conroy's philter speak explained

Over at Broadbanned Revolution Jon Seymour has explained some of the probs with Conroy's support of Internet filtering - using the Government's own departmental webpage.
Just click on the yellow highlights in the text at Frequently Asked Questions!

Well he said it!

The parliament of Australia is made up of elected representatives of the people of Australia and if the parliament decides it wants to go an extra step, that's what the parliament does,” he said, adding people have the chance to “toss us out if they don't like what we do or they don't like what somebody else does”.
**Stephen Conroy in TechWorld interview about internet filtering March '09**