The thing I find so surprising about all of this is that I would never expect a "normal" country like Australia to have censorship issues. China, North Korea, Iran... Australia? Is the Australian government simply too powerful for its people's own good?
Australians are very apathetic about their rights. Many people think it goes back to our roots. Most countries have some kind of founding story that involves revolution, violence, some kind of struggle for freedom (even if it is more myth than reality). Australia doesn't. We were handed a cosy democracy by the British and it's been all rosy ever since. So while most people easily conceive of the government as incompetent, misguided or even corrupt, almost nobody ever even conceives of government as potentially evil.
Someone goes to Rudd and gives him a folder of 'objectionable material.' Also gives Rudd stats on how frequently it's accessed. And it's been on Rudd's mind ever since and he's trying to disinfect Australia and himself from it.
Not too powerful, just overly conservative. This has its advantages - our financial crisis experience was mild because regulations in the banking sector (plus our small size plus our mining industry, but let's avoid that discussion here) helped us through.
But sometimes that conservative need to protect is combined with ignorance of reality, technical reality in these instances. That's a bad thing.
(Some side notes on conservatism - we're a country who didn't have it's own national flag in practice for 50 years post Federation; one of our first national Acts of Parliament was the 'White Australia' policy which lasted until 1975; the Prime Minister we had when Hitler invaded Poland was the same guy we had when Kennedy was shot 25 years later; and we call Football 'Soccer'.)
I doubt our banks are as safe as everyone says. Our housing market, by many measures is in a much bigger bubble than where the US got to and I'm convinced this is not due to supply demand fundamentals (as most people have been brainwashed into) - plenty of research out there as to why. We haven't seen bad times for 20 years. When we finally do (and there are people like Jim Chanos out there right now shorting China Property, i.e. Australian resources), that is when the swhtf. Our banks have massive exposure to mortgages. Not that many need to go bad before our banks are in trouble.
Um.. what do you mean by liberal? It is true that the Liberal government supported them (as did Labor).
But they were conservative in that they restricted financial institutions in a number of ways (high capital requirements, strong(er) regulation of loans, etc etc)
No I would say the Australian government is inventing policy without consultation to what it's citizens actually want.
Nobody is really sure where all this (plus the internet censorship) is coming from.
It's rather embarrassing. Add this to the mineral-tax grab announced without consultation by the government like some African dictatorship and it looks like the country is being run by a bunch of amateurs with no real experience and heads in the policy clouds.
Probably a bit partisan for HN but I have had it with their ineptitude.
Nobody is really sure where all this (plus the internet censorship) is coming from.
In a word, it comes from fear. Fear that the badies are going to blow us up while we sleep. Fear that the sexual deviants will molest us, or more likely just that they will have more fun than we can allow ourselves to have (being good religious folk). Fear that if someone holds an opposing viewpoint, this may make me feel like my own ridged, black and white outlook is not adequate to address the complexities of reality.
A lot of people know where it's coming from. That doesn't really make anything any better though.
Are you sure it's coming from there and not just leveraging it? Seems more likely to me that it's a power grab. The world took notice about what happened in Iran. I didn't hear any governments being thankful for internet anonymity when that broke out. In fact I've mostly been hearing about plans for "filtering" since then.
I do think that it originates from there, yes. Although I'm sure there are also those who may not believe in the cause and are only using these issues for their own political purposes. I suspect for example that one of the main reason's that the "clean feed" idea just won't die despite massive opposition is that the government is courting the favour of Xenophon and Fielding in the Senate.
The only problem I have with the Fielding/Xenophon theory is that the government never talks about it, and both Fielding and Xenophon have a pretty bad track record when it comes to voting with the Government. Fielding effectively blocked the ETS, so I don't see the Government doing them any favours.
The other thing that worries me is you don't see the opposition hammering them on this. It's clearly unpopular with younger voters, and it could be a good chance, to pick them up. But maybe it backlashes against others who don't understand the issues and just hear 'OMG child porn!'.
Bottom line : I seriously don't know where the push for internet censorship is coming from, and I have creeping dread that it is actually bipartisan.
I get what you mean. Maybe I was inaccurate when I talked about the Xenophon/Fielding thing in the present tense. I think that if there was any idea of courting Fielding/Xenophon, it was attempted much earlier than the ETS business. I remember some months ago now, hearing that there was talk of adding gambling sites to Conroy's blacklist, without looking up where that talk may have come from, I could pretty confidently guess that it came from Xenophon. But not much came of it as far as I could tell, Conroy was too focussed on trying to demonstrate that his blacklist wouldn't suffer from any scope creep, and I'm sure this outcome must not have pleased Xenophon. As I alluded to previously, my feeling is that by now, the push for the "clean feed" is more ideology than political manoeuvring and I think you're right that by now the government would have given up on getting Fielding/Xenophon on side. I still think it's likely that they would have given it a go though.
I also think you're right that there is likely some bipartisanship on this issue and yeah that's pretty scary. But it's not really surprising is it? Considering the somewhat perfect storm of social conservatism that we seem to have all over the place right now. Conroy, Fielding, Xenophon, Abbott, Rudd, they all have that streak in varying degrees and must be only the tip of the ice berg. I'm just hoping that some of these guys maintain a bit of practicality and reason.
It's always the religious social conservatives who fret and worry that society is going to hell in a hand basket and it's their self appointed task to save the misguided and punish the wicked. That's the root of the push IMO and yep, it seems to be pushing up though both sides of politics pretty well right now.
1. A lot of these creepy proposals never get past the proposal stage. Take the Australia Card.
2. Australia's legal institutions have proved reasonably effective in dealing with such creepy laws. E.g. laws banning the Communist Party were struck down in the '50s.
3. This latest proposal is about law enforcement, not censorship. Creepy anti-terrorism laws aren't a peculiarly Australian vice.
4. The government doesn't have a majority in both houses; it needs the complicity of non-government members to make laws.
None of this is to say that this is a good thing. It's creepy and embarrasing and I wish they'd stop.
The Australia Card was very nearly law - the Hawke Government went to the 1987 double dissolution election on it, and won, and the scheme was only defeated because of a small technical error in the pre-dissolution legislation which deferred the commencement date of the legislation to regulations (which can be disallowed by the Senate, where the coalition had a then majority).
Because the legislation couldn't be changed when it was presented to a potential joint sitting, this technicality is what killed it. Not popular opposition.
My mistake. Thank you for the correction. I certainly agree that popular opposition to creepy laws isn't an area where Australia has covered itself in glory over the years. That's not a specifically Australian failing, though.
