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?
