Australian Government Backing Down On Censorship

Combat Wombat sends the news that the government in Australia has begun waffling on whether country-wide Internet censorship will be mandatory. "The Rudd Government has indicated that it may back away from its mandatory Internet filtering plan. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy today told a Senate estimates committee that the filtering scheme could be implemented by a voluntary industry code. ... [The shadow communications minister] said he had never heard of a voluntary mandatory system. ... Senator Conroy's statement is a departure from the internet filtering policy Labor took into the October 2007 election to make it mandatory for ISPs to block offensive and illegal content." The censorship plan, which has been called "worse than Iran," was bypassed even before trials started. A minister's defection may have effectively blocked any chance of implementation.

Comments

I laugh at politics

[Sparx139]

It's so funny to watch a government make a huge mistake, and then try to back down from the decision without saying "sorry guys, we screwed up"

Re:I laugh at politics

[inject_hotmail.com]

Make no mistake, this was all about lining the pockets of the companies that were involved, nothing else.

How could they not know this would fail? Fiasco was written all over it.

Canada had the gun registry that failed miserably. It was supposed to cost about $120mil, but ended up costing the (now poor) tax payers $2 billion. Yep. 2. Billion.

My question is - who got paid...someone did...a lot. Every man, woman and child alive today would have to register two guns for this money to be recuperated.

The same can be found in any government large enough to force tax collection, but the obviousness of it really bothers me.

Re:I laugh at politics

[TapeCutter]

Not picking on you personally but the average slashdotter is pretty gullible when it comes to machiavellian politics. This was no mistake, politicians often adopt a cause in order to kill it. Conroy deliberately killed the trails and legislation by including Fielding's anti-abortion supporters on the blacklist. I and many other Aussies predicted this outcome, not because we are particularly astute, mearly because we saw the same thing happen with the last government.

Re:I laugh at politics

[Anonymous Coward]

Not picking on you personally but the average slashdotter is pretty gullible when it comes to machiavellian politics.

Not picking on you, but were you including yourself in that statement? :)

This was no mistake, politicians often adopt a cause in order to kill it.

I disagree. Your statement implies that Conroy was on "our" side, when all evidence is to the contrary.

It wasn't adopted because they wanted to kill it. Conroy wanted to see how much political capital he'd have to spend in order to push this through for favours from the religious conservative.

Conroy deliberately killed the trails and legislation by including Fielding's anti-abortion supporters on the blacklist.

More likely he used that as a test to see if people would notice. Whether it worked or not didn't matter to him - he just wanted to see if he would be able to use it in the future (assuming the trial was deemed a "success".)

Balance of Power

[novakreo]

This is why Westminster-style governments should never have a senate majority.

Re:Yeah, great... try that in the UK

[MichaelSmith]

(I am an Australian).

As for your theory, well, I dunno really. Our low population density tends to give us a slightly different attitude to waste and security issues. It really is possible to walk away from your problems here. Its different from the UK where people are crammed in a lot more and have to live with their mistakes. Also we make our living from mining, basically. We dig stuff up and flog it to the Japanese and Chinese who sell it right back to us with a million percent markup. Eventually the stuff in the ground will dry up and we will have to find an honest way to make a living.

Re:Who didn't see this coming?

[Opportunist]

None of the things living under rocks on the floor of the Pacific Ocean that I asked said they didn't know about it 'til I told them.

This is a good example of how opt-in and opt-out are "technically the same"...

Re:!victory

[Scrameustache]

Guantanamo acting as a handy distraction while other "secret" prisons remain open

I guess as long as we can get links like that, it's fair to say that freedom of speech is still alive.
Thanks for the info, it's infuriating, but I'd better be mad than be ignorant.

Re:!victory

[Shakrai]

Suspected terrorists are not prisoners of war. The "war on terror" is a fabrication which can be extended indefinitely as long as there is one nutjob on the planet who has the United States in their sight

Yes, it can. And I find that troubling. More troubling though is the notion that people who aren't citizens and whose only connection to our country is their professed desire to do it harm deserve the full protection of our constitution and criminal justice system.

When non-citizens seek to do us harm from overseas I do not regard that as criminal activity. It's not state-directed activity either and falls somewhere in between. An appropriate response would be to issue letters of marque and treat them like the pirates of old but I suspect that if we actually did this it wouldn't go over very well. Thus we are stuck with the military response.

Given that, I might be tempted to say that perhaps our military should stop trying to take them prisoner. Kill them on the battlefield and the whole debate over how to house/prosecute them becomes a moot point. Some of the higher-ups may have actionable intelligence that we want -- in this case I see nothing wrong with a trial before a military commission after we are done with them. It worked for the German saboteurs from Operation Pastorius.