It’s an oddity of the human character that brain surgery, a very serious matter, is often the subject of jokes.
Perhaps it’s our way of dealing with the frightening and unthinkable.
The notion of an utter incompetent engaging in something as delicate as tampering with our brains makes us squeamish. What might he do to our minds? Ouch! So we joke about it.
Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy: mash-ups by Bob Whidon
In similar vein, many informed Australians have been making jokes about Senator Stephen Conroy for some years now.
The sniggers began almost as soon as he begame Australia’s Communications Minister, after the Rudd Labor Government was elected to power in 2007. They took off the next year, when it became apparent the Minister was quite insistent on imposing a mandatory internet ‘filter’ on all Australians.
The internet can be viewed as the neuronal structure of a globalizing humanity. It provides the basis for closely interwoven global society. Information streams through the network – information about people, activities, ideas, money and other data. It travels at the speed of light. This is the information flow that binds us together and makes our interconnected world work.
Our generation has grown used to the technology and participated in its growing sophistication. We are alive at a most remarkable time in human history. It’s a time when the mind of humanity is literally coming together, in ‘real time’. We’re still at the beginning of this extraordinary metamorphic process.
Like other people around the world, many Australians quickly embraced the new technology and have been enthusiastically exploring its potential ever since. It connects us to each other – and to the world. In a large and isolated continent, both are important. The internet opens up a global market for buying and selling, a global information exchange for giving and receiving, a global playground for fun and creativity.
So far, so good. Then along comes Senator Conroy c 2007. As the newly-appointed Communications Minister of the incoming Rudd Labor Government, Conroy announced his intention to impose a mandatory filter on the internet connection entering Australia from the outside world. His rationale for proposing this was purportedly concern about ‘child pornography’.
The Minister has a unique style
At first, his proposal gained traction. Who, after all, wants to be branded a peodophile? Who doesn’t want to protect children? A handful of well-promoted supporting voices popped up to push the case for the ‘filter’ and for a short time all seemed to be going well for the Minister and his censorious schemes.
But a civil libertarian reaction of unparalleled ferocity slowly erupted. It has been spurting giant blobs of angry lava ever since. Conroy’s simplistic scheme for fencing off Australia’s internet ‘feed’ by mandatory filters, forcing ISPs to ban a secret government list of web pages, has provoked a quite unprecedented furore of outraged opposition from technologically literate Australians.
Quite soon, Conroy found himself despised by his natural constituency as Communications Minister: the IT industry and experienced IT users.
A Minister at odds with his industrial (and even his public) constituency can be just what’s needed, if a government believes urgently-needed reforms are blocked ny an intractable bureaucratic log-jam and shameless vested interests. But a Minister at odds with his constituency had better be competent. He’d better know what he’s doing – and been seen to know what he’s doing. Otherwise, he’s in trouble.
In Stephen Conroy’s case, there has been precious little sign throughout his term in office that the Minister has much of a clue about modern communications. His spoken contributions to debates are frequently the butt of ridicule. When he waxes lyrical about IT, it often sounds ridiculous.
By April 2009, with the Rudd Government’s three year term half over, there was no discernable progress towards new broadband. The Minister was bogged in negotiations with major Telcos (most notably Telstra) that seemed to be going nowhere. Most noticeable of all, he kept pushing an increasingly unpopular mandatory government censorship scheme. It seemed the wheels might be coming off for Stephen Conroy’s Ministerial career.
The Minister's new credit card
Then came a remarkable turn-around. Just at the moment when it seemed he was most in peril, Senator Conroy managed to extract an agreement out of Prime Minister Rudd for a MASSIVE new public investment – potentially more than $40 billion – to create a new government owned wholesale monopoly: the National Broadband Network.
This was upping ante in the Government’s broadband infrastucture spend by an order of magnitude.
A Minister who can extract a LOT more money for his portfolio is usually regarded as a hero by his constituency. Access to large pot of public loot is a good way to make industry lobbyists respectfully polite. Rudd and Conroy presumably calculated that the $40+ billion honey pot would calm the bees, and the IT industry could be expected to fall into line and back a man who’d turned out after all to be a very effective Minister.
That happened, to some extent. But by mid-term, Conroy was already a seriously tainted brand. Even though the NBN gave him a new story to tell – he still had to deal with the ‘filter’ issue.
If Conroy and the ALP Government had backed down on mandatory internet censorship at almost any time between then and the recent Federal election, I think Labor would now be back in power with a clear majority. That’s despite its much-reported failures in other important policy areas, most notably climate change.
The NBN was a huge advantage for Labor in the election campaign. It may still be decisive in pursuading cross-benchers to support Labor in forming Government now, after the knife-edge August 21st election. But Labor’s stubborn insistence on hanging onto the ‘filter’ policy took the shine off the NBN. Many IT fans would have pushed hard for Labor at this election because of the size of its NBN commitment, which dwarfed the Coalition’s counter-pledge. As it was, many of us had split loyalties. In general, we want a major new public investment in telecoms infrastructure. But many Australians – myself included – regard issues of censorship, net neutrality and data privacy as even more significant.
Unexpectedly – and to its credit – the Liberal-National Party Coalition came off the fence during the election campaign on the ‘filter’ issue. It opposed the mandatory ‘filter’, reaffirming its Howard era policy of assistance to home-users wanting ‘filters’ and no mandatory censorship. The Coalition undoubtably gained votes as a result. The number of votes that shifted is unknwon, but even one in two hundred would have proved decisive in this very close election. Interestingly, the much vaunted ‘Christian backlash’ against the Coalition never happened. Few Christians who’ve thought about the issue share the extreme pro-censorship views of their would-be spokeman, ex-SAS Commander Jim Wallace. The case for censorship had always been based on hype and exaggeration.
Viewing the internet as an evolving global brain explains why the internet-using public reacted as we did to the threat of censorship – to such an extent that in the pre-election peridod, articles published about the ‘filter’ attracted hundreds of comments and online polls showed an anti-filter sentiment as high as 99:1.
As the internet evolves, its needs sophistication in regulation. As a general rule, let freedom rule! Freedom to trade. Freedom to exchange information and ideas. Freedom to play.
The Minister and his new boss
Any attempt to interfer with these freedoms must be rational, demonstrably necessary, evidence-based and implemented with broad consent. If not, it will encounter staunch resistence – and rightfully so.
At this time, a week after the election, it’s still not clear who will form government from a parliament in which no single party has a majority.
Prime Minister Gillard and the ALP may have the best chance. Ironically, the NBN is a key issue which may give them the edge with the five or six cross-benchers. But with almost every political force in the country now opposing the ‘filter’ apart from Labor and the one-Senator ‘Family First’ party, it would seem the public have dealt this unpopular proposal a fatal blow.
Let’s hope the Prime Minister is not so cocooned by out-of-touch advisers that she misses the significance of the filter issue.
A poll on Australia's 'Whirpool' IT website; it's based on a small self-selected sample of IT fans. Even so...
During the election, on one of the few occasions she fielded a question on the ‘filter’, Gillard made idiotic remarks implying the internet can and should be regulated like cinemas. If that’s what she truly believes Gillard is not up to the job. Perhaps, as she ponders her tenuous hold on power, Ms Gillard can find a better adviser than Stephen Conroy on the way forward for her communications policy. She could do a lot worse than talk to EFA activist and telecoms engineer Mark Newton.
Australians won’t tolerate a lumberjack posing as a brain surgeon messing with our share of the evolving global mind.
The global communications web is a delicate miracle. Please show respect, Ms Gillard.
Tens of billions of dollars of new NBN neurones may well help speed up Australia’s mediocre data transmission speeds. That will be a blessing.
Even so, brain stimulus is no substitute for an enlightened mind.
