Louise W.

the argument is made, by The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy on ABC’s Radio National 30th October 2008, that, ‘for example’ “child pornography is illegal and families do not want their children to be able to see child pornography and so, it should be filtered out”. the problem with this argument: the storage/use/viewing of child pornography is itself a criminal act, and when you try to apply this argument to other examples then the meaning is entirely different. so, ‘for example’, murdering is illegal. if the government proposes to filter out any sites depicting or discussing murder then the result is not law enforcement, but the limiting of ‘ideas’ about murder. Unlike the case of child pornography, where a crime has been committed in the abuse of a child’s rights in order to produce the pornography, no murder need have taken place in order to produce the site depicting or discussing the idea of murder. or, ‘for example’, the word ‘euthanasia’ was scrutinised as a topic worthy of filtering (suggested by another parliamentarian to Conroy). Euthanasia, though related to murder, bears very little relationship to the removal of anybody's liberties, except for the removal of a person’s choice to end their own suffering. filtering out the topic of ‘euthanasia’ from our internet actively quashes discourse about a contentious social issue. to use child pornography as the example and the reason for introducing a filtering system, is at its heart a dishonest one, pretending, as it does, that it could be the example against which others could be measured. there is currently an overriding dishonest argument for the government’s pledge to filter the net, and this argument refers to the pledge to protect families from ‘bad’ content on the internet. the emphasis is on the word 'pledge', because it is important to do what you say you are going to do, and keep your word, and what could be dishonest about that? but to say you are keeping your word, while asserting one possible course of action as the stand in for that promise is a heinous form of duplicity. a filtering system is a blanket approach which disadvantages everybody by a diminishment in what can be thought about. it is literally a limiting of ideas.