With total and utter cluelessness and wanton wasting of Australian taxpayers' money, Senator Steven Conroy continues to plough forward with his attempts to bring Chinese-style dictatorial censorship of the Internet to every Australian citizen whether they want it or not. Thankfully, 2 different childrens' advocacy groups - Save the Children and National Children’s & Youth Law Centre - have added their weight to the growing number of advocacy groups, freethinkers, IT industry groups, parents and other Australian citizens who don't believe that this filter is the right way to spend our money.
To have a read of the joint statement released recently, click here.
What this Internet filter definitely will do is cost millions of our dollars, fail to achieve any of the goals such a project should be aiming for, increase the cost of Internet access in Australia, slow down Internet access in Australia, increase the amount of equipment ISPs need to run to provide Internet access (therefore reducing the reliability of the already unreliable Internet access we have here in Australia, impose a closed list (as in closed to public scrutiny) of blocked sites, reduce the freedom of every Australian, prove that we were once the "lucky" country but are now the "unfairly censored" country and eventually fail and be removed. Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, this will all happen after wasting millions of dollars of taxpayer money that could be better spent providing functional protection for our children through better education as well as a great many other things.
I wonder when we, as a people, agreed to have the Government take control of our morals instead of us accepting responsibility for them ourselves? I certainly don't remember that being an election issue, however it seems to be something the Government just decided that they could do better than parents can. I certainly don't recall democratically electing a dictatorship.
I wonder what it is with Senators with "Steven" in their names, Communications in their portfolio and no practical knowledge of this subject at all. First came Senator Ted Stevens in the USA who thinks of the Internet as "...a series of tubes" and gave the world, aside from a good belly laugh, a good understanding of his total lack of understanding of how the Internet works. Now comes Senator Steven Conroy who wants to try and censor Australian citizens' Internet access as if he was running a dictatorship, believing that this is a good thing and won't be a total joke, waste of money (as in *our* money), failure and example of how little the Government understands not only what the Internet is, but what freedom of speech means. Not that we have a Constitutional right to free speech as the American people have.
Regards,
The Outspoken Wookie
2 comments:
Conroy's playing the political game. It's a means of keeping factional party members happy and an attempt to leverage Fielding into supporting Labor on other key issues - although this doesn't seem to be working out well. It certainly hasn't with Xenophon.
The sooner the commercial trial analysis is finished and says "nice idea, no banana" the better.
G'day Chris,
Playing bullshit factional games with taxpayer money is something that happens a lot in politics. Spending millions of dollars to get Fairytales First Senators onside is something that even Senator Conroy should realise is never going to work as the Fairytales First Party has rather little connection with reality.
So, if Conroy stops wating our money and making himself look like a technologically illiterate idiot he'll garner just as much support from the Fairytales First Party and in the mean time, make a better Communications Minister.
And all of the ISPs who've been trialing the Filter have been saying "stupid idea, definitely no banana" for some time now. :)
Post a Comment