EFA: Censorship In Oz Wastes Taxpayers' Money

antic writes: "In a report by AustralianIT (Net censorship a $2.5m 'waste'), EFA says that after all the fuss about the Australian government censoring the Internet for Australians, and the government spending a substantial amount of money on the effort, only six complaints about local sites were made in the second 6 months of operation. It suggests that the majority of money spent, and investigations carried out, only helps the largely U.S.-based content filtering industry."

Comments

EFA's detailed analysis

[danny]

EFA has a more detailed analysis of the figures. We also have an FOI request in that attempts to get details of what exactly has been subject to takedown notices.

My own site has some details of takedown notices and classifications.

Danny.

Current Oz Government on the way out

[Goonie]

For the benefit of our international readers:

The current Australian government is a (highly steady) coalition of two conservative parties, which has been in power since 1996. The other major party is the Labor Party, roughly analogous to the British Labor party, but still retaining tighter links to its labor union history.

Our parliamentary and party system, again, most closely resembles Britain, in that party discipline is very strong, and votes in the lower house are purely a formality. However, the upper house of parliament is not controlled by a single party, and two small left-wing parties (the Democrats and Greens), a religious right-wing annoyance, and a member of the lunar-nutball right hold the balance of power in that house, meaning that the government has to reach agreement with either the opposition, or some or all of the others, to get legislation through.

The current Prime Minister is one John Howard, who was aptly described by American travel writer Bill Bryson as "the world's most boring individual". By Australian standards, he is a economic conservative (though due to his current electoral unpopularity he has swung towards popular pork-barelling), and an utter social reactionary.

For some time, he has tried to play off the unpopularity with rural voters on economic issues (the government has imposed a universal sales tax, which has resulted in higher prices and a great deal of extra accounting overhead for small businesses, who are not happy about it) by, in essence, appealing to their prejudice against drug users, asylum-seekers, homosexuals, the primarily city-based and relatively wealthy advocates of removing the symbolic link to the British monarchy, Aboriginals, and so on. Unfortunately for Mr Howard, the rural and outer-urban constituency appears to be sufficiently annoyed by the economic issues that they will vote Labour or (in relatively small proportions, thankfully) lunar-right regardless, and the inner-urban "elite" are going to also desert his party because of disgust at his social policies as well as economic.

I think I will join most Australians in welcoming Mr Howard's fairly imminent and fairly certain departure (the election must be held by November or so). Unfortunately, the alternative, Labor, doesn't appear particularly inspiring - if a little more clueful on some aspects of IT policy, which is nice.

Go you big red fire engine!

Censorship is a crime

[leereyno]

I've never been able to understand how it is that anyone would WANT censorship of anything.

There is no such thing as an idea or a fact that needs to be hidden away from view. If something is a fact then hiding it is not going to change it. If it is an idea then it will stand or fall based upon its merits.

Therefore the only people who are in favor of censorship are those who fear the truth, or whose own ideas do not stand up to cross examination.

Most of the censor happy types will drag out the old argument that there are things in this world that are harmful for children to see. Bullshit. I've never seen anything in my life, and I'm about to turn 30, that I ever thought would be inherently harmful for someone of any age to see. Now if you take something, say violence, and feed someone a died of nothing but violence, then yes I can see how that might be harmful to anyone of any age. But seeing violence or sex or you name it within the context of other things so that an overall balance is created is no more harmful to a 14 year old than it is to a 40 year old. The "save the children" argument is a weak argument that the censorship types fall back on because they don't have anything else to stand on.

Think about it, if censorship was a good idea, would anyone have to resort to a gut-level fear based argument to convince anyone that it was?

This is why I say that censorhip is a crime. It is a crime because it is a lie that is not just told, it is a lie that is perpetrated upon other people. It is an act of violence against the mind of another.

The best way to fight censorhip is to refuse to be silenced and to refuse to be censored. There isn't anything anyone can do to you that would be worse than allowing your sources of information to be controlled. Information control is mind control, don't let your mind be controlled.

Lee Reynolds