It seems Comrade Rudd and his over zealous communications minister Steve Conroy are keen to take us down the same path as those other bastions of freedom, China, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia. Closed tests of mandatory internet filtering at the ISP level have been completed and are now on the verge of being trialed on the nation at large. In short, the Australian government is about to censor every Australian's internet feed and there is no legal way we can opt out of it.
The Australian public has not been given the chance to engage in discussion about this, as any free country should in such important matters, it has just been thrust upon us. Regardless of whether censorship is the right or wrong thing to do in this situation, imposing it without public debate is the hallmark of a tyrant and is a trend that all thinking people should worry about. I am worried, and I am pissed off. Comrade Rudd, I voted for you in the last election for one reason and one reason only, to end the trend that the previous government had been implementing for a decade, that of slowly eroding our civil liberties. You come to power and what do you do? You take over where little Johnny left off. I am disappointed and I am angered. I will not make the same mistake come next election.
So what is the government's line on why this is being done? It is that time honored excuse, used many times in the past and surely to be used many times in the future... "to protect the children". This is a great excuse and an argument that nobody with an IQ less than 80 (the general population?) can argue against. We are programmed by biology to be over protective when it comes to children. It is is good thing generally and is one of the evolutionary reasons we still exist as a species. It is a bad thing though when our tendencies to zealously protect our young are preyed upon by those using it as a pretext to push a less palatable agenda. Nobody can deny that protecting our children is a good thing and the key to using this pretext is to turn any argument against the agenda (in this case mandatory filtering) into an argument against the protection of children.
In its basic form the argument looks like this:
Joe Citizen: "This internet censorship deal, is just not on. It is a restriction of my freedoms as an adult with free choice."
Government:" If you equate your freedoms with the freedom to prey upon innocent children than the government is at odds with you sir! This government will do anything to stop the likes of you and protect our children!"
It is a fools argument and easy to dismantle but one that many Joe Blog types seem to swallow. You might look at this and think it is so transparent that nobody would use such an argument, at least not in this basic form. Think again. Senator Conroy has used it almost verbatim. To quote him:
"Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation of the internet is like going down the Chinese road. If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree."
So will this mandatory filtering protect our children? No! It will do zip, nada, sweet fuck all to protect our children from anything of real danger. Predators will still be able to stalk their victims via instant messaging, chat rooms, and social network sites. Child pornographers will still be trading their wares in the exact same way as they do now, via peer to peer networking. The filtering technology doesn't handle any of this. At most, all it will do is prevent children from entering a legitimate adult site, that would require them to have a credit card to enter anyways. And what child has a fucking credit card! All we are seeing here is the curtailing of the modern day version of finding dad's copy of playboy hidden in the bottom draw of his dresser! Big fucking deal. In short, the stuff that is being filtered is not the stuff that poses the danger and as such this proposal does NOTHING to protect. The "protect our children" line is just a LIE and a PRETEXT.
"The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation."
-- Adolf Hitler
Wake the fuck up Australia!