Trekkie Monster of Avenue Q loves the internet. Specifcally internet porn. Pursuing his passion could be a little less straightforward after today’s announcement from Senator Conroy that the federal government will proceed with the establishment of a mandatory internet censorship regime in Australia.
I have no qualm with government agencies taking the fight to the denizens of cyberland, to would-be terrorists and kiddy fiddlers. Fair enough, the planning or incitement of such acts is and should be a crime.
But such a system is simply far too powerful a tool to rest with bureaucrats in fluorescent-lit basements, glued to their monitors, trawling the internet for content that might infringe any one point on a hastily cobbled-together, subjectively-determined register of possible moral, ethical and legal violations. Aside from that, I'm going to leave aside philosophical discussion on free speech, since in the absence of a constitutional guarantee for it, free speech means little in the Australian context.
Additionally, we have to wonder: would such a system be open to abuse? What safeguards against abuse would exist?
I am certainly not suggesting that a pernicious, incumbent government in Australia would be so brazen or so bold to ban the websites of its main political rivals. But what of smaller, fringe parties like, for example, One Nation? The government of the day seemed pretty insistent that the wider public simply stop listening to Pauline. What if in 1996 John Howard had decided that we oughtn’t to listen to red-headed xenophobes with whom, however rightly or wrongly, a significant proportion of the electorate identified. It is a slippery slope.
Already this government has blacklisted a site that displayed a list of the sites it intended to ban… doesn’t sound like a government that tolerates dissent.
What of governments with hardline moral agenda? An Abbott-led Coalition government would not, I imagine, be too keen on gay rights. Indeed many in the Coalition have expressed the view that the issue of homosexuality should not be discussed in the classroom. And while we’re doing that in the classroom, they might argue, then why not ‘protect’ children in the virtual world too?
What of desperate governments? Administrations of both a Labor and Liberal persuasion that have found themselves dependent on the votes of lunatic religious senators have demonstrated themselves capable of playing with all sorts of unanticipated bargaining chips. Might a resurrected Harradine request a ban on Islamic websites?
What about cloudy moral issues? Euthanasia has widespread support in the community, but is illegal. Will campaigners be unable to further their cause on the World Wide Web?
But most importantly of all: the filtering software Conroy intends to employ simply doesn’t work. It’s been found to inadvertently ban certain Wikipedia articles, perfectly legal gambling sites, perfectly legal pornographic material, a substantial swathe of YouTube clips and, most oddly, the site of a Queensland dentist.
Surely it would make more sense to pour the resources from this scheme into tracking down paedophiles and terrorists rather than destroying Queenslanders' hopes for better dentition.
The wowserism’s gone far enough. [CENSORED] off Conroy, and [CENSORED] off, Rudd. As Trekkie Monster would doubtless say the internet is for porn.
And Wikipedia, gambling, YouTube and dentists.
All very good points, but more importantly then the problem of letting bureaucrats decide what we can see, is that it simply doesn't work. I don't mean in the sense you mention that is filters excessively, removing things it shouldn't, but that it doesn't even stop what it claims it is intended for. Illicit material, such as paedophilic content, is not distributed on the web - it is primarily distributed through email lists and peer to peer networks, and other forms of 'direct' communication on the net, which the internet filter does not encompass. Those means of dissemination will be unaffected. That is the primary lunacy of the proposal, a proposal which is nothing but a hollow, ineffectual, symbolic gesture that will do nothing to actually protect anyone, but rather vast amounts of damage to Australian culture and the ITC industries.
ReplyDeleteOh, and what is most disturbing about this is the revelation of just how stupendously blinkered, arrogant and out of touch politicians actually are, for anyone with even a modicum of rationality or common sense in the formation of their opinions need only read ONE clear argument against this to see that it is an absurdly wasteful, ineffective and damaging course of action. Yet the legislation moves forward, despite the chorus of intelligent protest that has been going on for more then a year now.
ReplyDelete(Can you tell this issue REALLY angers me?)
I can. And it angers me and Trekkie Monster, too.
ReplyDeleteThe Greens are pretty incensed and it's getting a greater degree of media attention (in Fairfax/ABC sources at least) than I thought it might - which is a positive at least.
You might think that the government would have learnt from the spectacular failure of its other symbolic gestures: Grocery Watch and Fuel Watch. Rather than spending money addressing the root causes of problems, they pursue wasteful patchwork solutions that humour populist, uneducated morons in the outer suburbs.
Abbott's new formula in opposition appears to be "oppose for the sake of opposing" so there's actually a chance that the Libs might block it solely to embarrass the government.