The Great Australian Firewall - who's really behind the censorship push?
Following the ABC Radio National debate between Mark Newton and Jim Wallace, there’s been a lively discussion on RN’s Life Matters Guestbook.
I was gratified to see the Guestbook published my comment unedited (scroll down).
Another comment posted soon afterwards is intriguing. As the author was anonymous (initials GW), I trust he/she won’t mind me repeating it here. The whole comment is interesting, but there’s a punchline at the end (emphasis added):
Personally I find I can’t support censorship and certainly not the secret censorship of the proposal because open access to information is the best insurance for democracy and democratic discussion. Unfortunately to defend free speech and freedom of access to information, one has to defend the right of adults to access pornography.
Venus de Milo: topless in a Christian country
Nothing about censorship will do anything to stop the very real issue of abuse of real children in the real world. All government areas, state and federal, involved the care of abused children are starved of funding and personnel. The budget of $44 million would go a long way to doing something about those children and improving law enforcement where children are involved in any sort of abuse. To ignore these real problems and claim that censorship will help abused children is insulting to real abused children.
I am puzzled by something quite serious though. Why did Jim Wallace say “we” when talking about what the government are planning to do?
Here are Wallace’s words, according to this transcript of the interview:
“… the point is that we’re not about to stop the AFP doing its work in trying to get hold of these people on the peer to peer networks. What we’re doing is we’re making — as is the government’s intention with this trial and ISP filtering — we are making the Internet a safer environment for children.”
Innocent turn of phrase? Slip of the tongue? Or a sinister hint of collusive forces at work?
We report. You decide.
Remembering that Jim Wallace has a famous Scottish namesake, who rightly or wrongly was deemed guilty of treason by the English Monarch of the day, I consulted Wikipedia and discovered how William Wallace met his maker. It wasn’t nice:
Yesterday's terrorist, tomorrow's hero?
Following the trial, on 23 August 1305, Wallace was taken from the hall, stripped naked and dragged through the city at the heels of a horse to the Elms at Smithfield. He was hanged, drawn and quartered — strangled by hanging but released while still alive, emasculated, eviscerated and his bowels burnt before him, beheaded, then cut into four parts. His preserved head was placed on a pike atop London Bridge. It was later joined by the heads of the brothers, John and Simon Fraser. His limbs were displayed, separately, in Newcastle upon Tyne, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Stirling, and Aberdeen.
This, I think, is over the top for the post-Bush era.
If ever Jim develops a guilty conscience, perhaps he could come to a voluntary arrangement with God instead? How about spending the next decade or two clearing landmines in Afghanistan – and decontaminating Iraq from residues of depleted uranium left by Australia’s valiant ‘allies’?
