Charles Heunemann

The governments new scheme is anti-family and has been doomed to failure from the very beginning. Our previous government was cajoled into agreeing to support this bill (back in 1999 by Senator Brian Harradine who wanted the government to block internet pornography in return for his vote on the GST). Harradine duded the government on that one.

Fast forward 6 years and the government announced a National Filter Scheme where families could download “Family Side” (client side PC filters) for free. It took the coalition a further 12 months to get the scheme together just in time for the election. The big mistake here was the scheme didn’t have any time to take effect or be properly evaluated, bar one student, Tom Wood who got his 15 mins of fame when he worked out how to circumvent, and only temporarily mind you, one of the free filters on offer. Didn’t the media and the Labor opposition fly into hysterics over that one :-)

Exploiting these conditions our new government, Mr. Conroy and Mr. Tanner, were so hell bent on discrediting the coalitions long awaited National Filter Scheme they failed to consider just how impossible their alternative would be. Mr. Conroy’s all but saying that anyone not supporting the ISP filter scheme is a pedophile was a despicable statement guaranteeing opposition from both sides of the debate. Well Mr. Conroy your deal lust may well be catching up with you now.

Examples of how ludicrous Labors scheme is and how doomed it is to failure are already showing themselves. The governments “black list” is reported to contain only 10,000 banned sites! Internet porn alone is estimated to make up about 12% of all Web sites. That is one out of every 8 Internet websites is pornographic, and there are over 400 million pornographic web pages on the net.

What the government is failing to understand is that users of the Internet access content via a variety of means. For example what is it doing to stop illegal content coming into Australia via email? What about controlling the use of free Peer to Peer file sharing software applications like Limewire, Kaza and Bittorrent? Are those applications or the web sites that serve them going to be banned? Kids already use Free Anonymous Proxies to circumvent unsophisticated filters in their schools. Are Free Anonymous Proxies included in the “banned list”? What about free Instant Messenger software like Skype and Live Messenger? They can be used to share illegal files. Are they on the banned list? These are just a few of the popular Internet technologies being used now that are outside the control of the government’s proposed scheme. They cannot be controlled by ISPs however they can be controlled by a wide range of Family side filters.

The government’s scheme is actually Anti-family. By not supporting family side filtering the government is exposing children to sites that may be potentially harmful because you cannot possibly control the content on the web via ISP’s. This scheme was a dud in 1999 and it’s still a dud in 2008 and will go down as the most reckless waste of tax payer money in Australia’s digital history.