Slashdot Mirror
Australian Enterprises Block Sex Party's Political Site
schliz writes "Corporate web filters in some organizations are blocking web access to the Australian Sex Party, which is a registered political party that is contesting Australia's upcoming August 21 Federal Election. The site features policies and campaign material, including opposition to the Government's mandatory internet filtering proposal. Party convener Fiona Patten said that although the term 'sex' in the party's website URL could be responsible for its filtering woes, the party is unlikely to consider a name change: 'I think the fact that people are still blocking our site just because of the word "sex" in the name shows that we need this political movement.'"
"sex" is a word associated with pornography, but also with a huge number of non-pornographic meanings.
"sex party" on the other hand has less non-pornographic meanings. A google search for "sex party" gives the Australian political party web site as the first result. A number of the other results on the first page are not related to political parties. A google image search for "sex party" with safe search turned off gives a page full of skin.
If I was stupid enough to develop an internet filter, I might omit the word "sex" by itself from filtering, but if it appeared next to the word "party" it would definitely get a higher ranking.
As you say, just because their site contains the term "sex party" it doesn't necessarily mean it's the reason for the blocking. I think it's likely though.
From Wikipedia (ie. probably authored by them, but still they're obviously serious):
Censorship
* Bring about the establishment of a truly national classification scheme which includes a uniform non-violent erotica rating for explicit adult material for all jurisdictions and through all media including the Internet and computer games.
* Introduce an R and X rating for computer games.
* To overturn mandatory ISP filtering of the Internet (see Internet censorship in Australia) and return Internet censorship to parents and individuals.
* Oppose mandatory retention of all Australian users' internet browsing history and emails by ISPs for at-will inspection by law enforcement agencies, and support strong judicial oversight over the ability of law enforcement to access individuals' internet and email data.
Education
* To bring about the development of a national sex education curriculum as a first step in preventing the sexualisation of children.
* Development of a national internet education scheme for parents.
Equality
* To enact national anti-discrimination laws which make it illegal to unfairly discriminate against people or companies on the basis of job, occupation, profession or calling.
* To bring about equal numbers of men and women in the Parliament through enabling the Federal Discrimination Act to have jurisdiction extending to political parties.
* To create total equal rights in all areas of the law for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
* Overturn racist laws that ban Aboriginal people from possessing erotic and sexual media in the Northern Territory.
* Ensure the sexual rights and freedoms of the disabled and elderly.
Health
* To enact national pregnancy termination laws along the same lines as divorce law -- which allow for legal, no-fault, guilt-free processes for women seeking termination.
* The listing of Viagra, Cialis, and other drugs used to treat sexual dysfunction, on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
* Overturn restrictions on aid to overseas family planning organisations that reference abortion.
Protection of children
* Convene a Royal Commission into child sex abuse in the nation's religious institutions.
* Develop global approaches to tackling child pornography which focus on detection and apprehension of the producers of the material.
Workplace relations
* Ensure that the introduction of paid maternity leave is fair and equitable for small businesses.
* Abolish sex slavery and sexual servitude by introducing non morality-based immigration policies that allow bona-fide sex workers to work legally in Australia.
Other
* Ending the tax exempt status for religions.
Australia may rank 16th on the Press Freedom Index, But unfortunately Australia doesn't have US 1st Amendment-like protection for political free speech. (The High Court has ruled that it's heavily implied in the constitution, but it's not absolutely stated). There's no "You can't block that, it's political free speech!" kind of laws.
Have a look at their actual website, if they are a 'joke party', I gotta say their policies look legit and sensible to me, but then I'm a sexual liberal, so what do I know?
I support your outrage, As an Oz resident, and a netizen. This is not cool. I also am considering to leave, although a pa$$port burning is not yet on the cards. Do not forget the Australia gov' has a pretty nasty track record in a lot of areas. At least this info is being leaked/discussed, not completely censored.
Waiting for the other shoe to...
Here are 2 other examples of harmless words that are filtered by DansGuardian (which is the filter we use in my company, and probably the one used here):
cluster -> because of 'lust' (there is one link on Microsoft's site with this word in the URL)
ptit (which is a contraction of the word petit in french) -> because of 'tit'.
After that, we disabled keyword and content filtering, because of the false positives, but we are keeping the sex filters anyway.
BTW, if you want to have nice links, just download DansGuardian's blacklists ;-)
The GP probably read the summary wrong like I did. If I had RTFA, I would have realized that it wasn't the great firewall of OZ blocking information about a political party (which would have been anti-democracy), it was instead a sensationalistic bit about a few corporate web-filters blocking the site.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Because the product started out being developed on MS-DOS 2.0, and back then it took extra effort to support both upper and lower case, so they just went with upper-case. And like most Windows software, it was modified just enough to work with the newest operating system.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
The web filters are mandated by Australian law IIRC. There was a list published a while ago on wikileaks of all of the websites that were being blocked... some were not offensive at all.