Category Archives: Politics

NSW Parliment; a safe harbour for paedophiles?

An audit of internet usage has been conducted in the NSW Parliament. The audit has found that members of parliament used their computers to access suspected child pornography.

NSW MPs or their staff have allegedly visited child pornography sites on parliament house computers.

The revelation that nine sites featuring “young people of indeterminate age” were visited comes in an independent report into parliamentary internet use by Ernst & Young.

The report was commissioned by house speaker Richard Torbay and upper house president Amanda Fazio after an unauthorised audit by a parliamentary internet staffer found 35 sites visited between November last year and September this year appeared to contain adult related content. –The Australian

After such a finding it is reasonable to expect that a further investigation would be underway followed by some disciplinary action. However such expectations turn out to be wishful thinking.

THE NSW Parliament will not discipline or even identify staff members or MPs who used the parliamentary computer system to access websites that contained ”sexually explicit images of young people”.

The Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, Richard Torbay, and the President of the Legislative Council, Amanda Fazio, have declared the matter closed despite confirmation that nine inappropriate websites were accessed.

In a statement yesterday, they confirmed that advice from the Crown Solicitor was that there was ”no legal obligation to refer the information in the report to the NSW Police Force”. –The Sydney Morning Herald

So there you have it. If you want to access inappropriate content and be protected, become a member of the New South Whales Parliament. When questionable content is found; no questions asked.

Although the term “Young People” doesn’t specifically mean children. The responsible thing to do would be to pass the matter onto the police. Not cover it up.

Gillard wants prohibited debate.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard wants to talk about euthanasia, a topic that is banned from discussion under the Australian Government censorship regime.

Julia Gillard has opened the way for a fresh debate on legalising euthanasia after the Greens leader, Bob Brown, nominated it as one of his top priorities.

While three state parliaments wrestle with euthanasia legislation, the Prime Minister and Senator Brown are expected to discuss the Greens’ demand for the repeal of legislation preventing territory governments from legalising voluntary euthanasia. –Sydney Morning Herald

Dr Philip Nitschke founder of Exit International has had his book titled The Peaceful Pill Handbook added to the Australian Governments ‘secret’ blacklist. The book is available online here and because our internet is currently uncensored we can access it. However a quick check of the blacklist shows that the (un-)Australian Government is very much against it’s citizens having access to euthanasia material.

Part of the ACMA Blacklist; peacefulpillhandbook.com is highlighted in green.

If you want to check the list yourself you can find it on wikileaks.org. The Sydney Morning Herald article “Web filtering pulls plug on euthanasia debate” also documents the governments anti-discussion stance.

So why does our Prime Minister suddenly want to discuss euthanasia. Certainly this puts her at odds with government policy. Still it’s good to see that some progress is being made.

Hopefully this will highlight how incompatible censorship is with a democratic society. Not even the PM will bow to the will of the censors, ironically her own party.

Web filtering pulls plug on euthanasia debate

Australian Labor: stepping back to 1984

I think Labor’s proposed National Broadband Network is bullshit. Not because we don’t need faster broadband but because Labor is offering it as bait to try and win back the voters. Having seen how fast Highspeed Broadband in mainland China is I am happy to say ‘no thanks’ to Labor’s National Broadband Network. Because while a faster Internet may seem tempting the idea of being restricted to government approved sites and services via Internet Censorship makes it a pretty raw deal.

Yes, Australia needs faster Internet but I believe there are better ways to achieve it. One of the reasons Conroy wants the ability to censor at the ISP level is because content providers; including Australian Citizens and Businesses often place their websites on United States based servers in order to avoid take down notices from Australian Authorities.

I believe the key to upgrading our infrastructure is to encourage more companies to set-up their data centres over here and the only viable way to do this is to abolish the regime of censorship that our nanny-state of a country has embraced for so long. (We don’t even have R18 for games.) Nobody is going to place servers in Australia if they think there is even the slightest change of being ordered to shut it down. I am not talking about the proposed ISP level censor here but rather the existing censorship that comes from ACMA in the form of take-down notices and $11,000 per day fines. This type of censorship has been around for many years but fortunately the Internet has help liberate the Australian people by giving them a means to speak out. The Internet has given the people a voice and freedom of speech like never before and the Australian Labor party wishes to silence it by implementing mandatory service provider level censorship. This combined with the plan to monitor the Internet usage of all Australian Citizens is destroying our digital economy and moving us towards George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty Four.

Labor will chase any would be investors away with even more draconian Censorship. In order to move forward we need to become a safe haven for freedom of speech and freedom of information. That combined with our own investments into the infrastructure will provide an incentive for overseas and Australian companies to run servers in Australian data centres which ultimately means they will be investing in Australia’s communication infrastructure and economy.

So Conroy is it ok for the government to invade our privacy?

It seems that Conroy may be ok with privacy invasion so long as it’s the Government and not Google. Last week he accused both Google and Facebook of violating users privacy.

Speaking before a Senate committee hearing late on Monday evening, Conroy described Google as having committed the “single greatest breach in the history of privacy” by deliberately collecting private wireless data while taking pictures for its “Street View” mapping service.

He also had sharp words for Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, claiming that the latter had a “complete disregard” for users’ privacy. –The Registrer

However Conroy has raised no such concerns regarding the Governments intrusion into citizens private lives.

Australian customs officers have been given new powers to search incoming travellers’ laptops and mobile phones for pornography, a spokeswoman for the Australian sex industry says.

Fiona Patten, president of the Australian Sex Party, is demanding an inquiry into why a new question appears on Incoming Passenger Cards asking people if they are carrying “pornography”.

Patten said officials now had an unfettered right to examine travellers’ electronic devices, marking the beginning of a new era of official investigation into people’s private lives. –The Age

To be fair perhaps Conroy just hasn’t gotten around to commenting yet. But there seems to be a worrying trend that the government can “Do no harm” while the rest of us require constant control.

Attorney General fails to grasp concept of free-speech.

When it comes to Freedom of Speech Attorney General; Robert McClelland simply doesn’t get it. 

FREEDOM of speech only goes so far and it does not stretch to racism, Attorney-General Robert McClelland says.

In a speech to a cyber-racism summit in Sydney, Mr McClelland said the Government was tackling the difficult world of cyber bullying and online protection of children.

“It may well be appropriate to set some limitation to public expression of hateful material,” Mr McClelland said.

He said cyber-racism was a growing area of concern for the Human Rights Commission. Eighteen per cent of racism complaints handed to the Commission in 2008-09 were about racist internet material, up from nine per cent in the previous year. –News.com.au

When it comes to Freedom of Speech you cannot simply pick and choose what speech is acceptable and what speech is not, because that is the complete reverse of Free-Speech. You don’t need to agree with the opinions of others but unless you are prepared to defend their right to say it you cannot call yourself a supporter of Free-Speech and nor can you reasonably expect others to respect your rights when you do not extend that courtesy yourself.

Most people don’t understand what it actually means to “Support” Freedom of Speech. When you support Free Speech you often find yourself defending many unpleasant things that you disagree with because all the other so called “supporters” have turned out to be fakes just trying to get some positive credit for a value they do not really hold.

A Jewish person defending Free-Speech needs to support the rights of holocaust deniers just as an African American person defending Free-Speech needs to support the rights of the Ku Klux Klan despite the content of that speech. Given in this context it is easy to see why there are so few real supporters of Free-Speech around.

When supporting the Freedom of Speech content is irrellivent and if you want your rights to be respected you must extend that respect to the freedom of others no matter who they are.

Senator Conroy involved in more secret meetings with special interest groups.

As if Senator Conroy’s previous secret meeting with the the Australian Christian Lobby has not already caused plenty of controversy the minister is at it again holding secret meeting with special interest groups.

This time Conroy has gone snow-skiing with Seven’s billionaire owner Kerry Stokes. Innocent enough at first glance, why shouldn’t he be able to have a social life after all. But when he later announces huge huge benefits for TV networks, that’s more than just a little suspicious.

The meeting came a month before the Victorian-based Senator Conroy cut licence fees paid by Seven, Ten and Nine for the next two years, depriving the Government of about $250 million in revenue.

The decision was controversial because Senator Conroy said it was to protect Australian content – but it included no binding requirement for the networks to spend the money on Australian content.

Instead, it went directly to their bottom line.

Both Mr Stokes and Senator Conroy refused to say what was discussed.

–News.com.au

This is the same Senator who argues that the Government Censorship Regime will have propper oversight, the same department that has exemption from Freedom-of-Information requests. The minister has also called for a Piracy Code of Conduct.

The biggest problem for copyright holders at present is that they can’t easily access the contact details of people who are caught pirating content through protocols like BitTorrent, which advertise their IP address, but nothing else. ISPs do not give up the details of which customer was using what IP address at particular times without a court order.

–APCmag.com

One of the key concerns about the Government having the authority to control content and speech on the Internet is that special interest groups will be lining up to have there personal distastes eradicated, in fact they already are. Do big media already have Conroy feeding out of their hand because it sure seems that way.

Can we really trust a man who looks after special interest groups at the expense of everyone else? What shenanigans will Conroy be upto next?

 

Australian Christian Lobby urges supporters to thank Conroy for ‘protecting kids’

Censorship in Australia: A quick overview.

This is just a brief over view of a critical situation that affects all Australian citizens please check the link the the bottom of the page.

 

As some of you may or may not know the Australian government is planning to introduce Mandatory Internet Censorship here in Australia, similar to that used by China, North Korea and Saudi Arabia. We will be the first Western “Democracy” in the world to have such a system.

Here are a few known facts.

 

  • No other Western Democracy in the world has mandatory Internet Censorship

 

This filter will set an incredibly dangerous precedent for the future by providing future governments and corporations with a powerful weapon against free-speech.

 

Click Here To Find Out What You Can Do

or Read More about censorship in Australia.