Aussie Internet Censorship Minister Censors Self

An anonymous reader writes "Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, the minister attempting to ram the great firewall of Oz down everyone's throat, has been removing all traces of the unpopular legislation from his main website with a JavaScript filter. From the article: 'It was revealed today a script within the minister's homepage deliberately removes references to internet filtering from the list. In the function that creates the list, or "tag cloud," there is a condition that if the words "ISP filtering" appear they should be skipped and not displayed.' Bear in mind, this is the same minister that tried to get the ISP of tech forum Whirlpool to pull the site after users there posted a response email from the ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority)."

Comments

Re:Elections are coming up...

[Sasayaki]

Unfortunately, this won't happen. (Disclaimer: I have posted this before, but it's worth restating)

Tony Abbot (The head of the Liberal party- that's the guys NOT in power, for you Americans) visited humble Darwin city recently and it was there that I personally got to ask him, in his public question and answer time, the following question (roughly remembered):

"The Internet is an important part of the lives of many young Australians, as well as Australia as a whole in this modern age- what do you think of (the Prime Minister- Americans would say 'president') Kevin Rudd's plan to censor the Internet?"

His answer began:

"Well, I'm afraid I'm probably going to disappoint you..." and yes, unfortunately, he did.

Paraphrased his answer was: "Stopping child pornography is extremely important to me and the Liberal party and therefore, if we can prove the censorship plan doesn't work, we will oppose it; but only it. We will continue to seek effective means to block 'filth' (his word) from entering our country any way we can. If the filter works, we will support it."

Basically the message I got from his reply is that Tony Abbot believes that the filter will work "well enough" and is too much of a hot potato to oppose politically. The subtext I personally divined from his answer was a little more chilling; that the filter didn't go far *enough* for his tastes, and that he'd personally rather a complete whitelist than a blacklist. Therefore, speaking as a card-carrying Liberal... if you think that voting for the Liberal party in the next election will make the filter go away, you are sadly mistaken.

On a side note, the fact that he himself is an extremely religious man probably doesn't help a great deal, since it seems that too many politicians tend to "trust God about these things" when it's abundantly clear that God knows sweet F-A about the Tubes and how they work.