Well, Julia Gillard’s reshuffle didn’t remove Stephen Conroy from his position as Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. It’s my understanding that she wanted to keep things as stable as possible until the next federal election (which, I’m hearing, could be as early as August), and I get that.
So what this means to me is that come the next election, I’ll be doing something I’ve never done, that is, voting below the line. I really want to send a message to Mr Conroy, concerning his harebrained scheme to force mandatory internet filtering at the ISP level (because 1) it won’t work the way they think 2) it won’t fulfill their goal, which is to “protect children” 3) it will probably cause major slowing 4) keeping blacklists of filtered sites is not really democratic or transparent 5) Mr Conroy thinks that Chinese-style internet filtering is a good thing, i.e., his contention if Google can do it for China, they can filter YouTube for Australia 6) the biggest petition ever in the history of Australia was sent to his office, in opposition of this filtering scheme and he totally ignored it 7) he appears to be pretty much technically incompetent and talks about “viruses passing through portals” or some other nonsense and 8) there are more, but I’m getting tired of writing this list).
So, Victorians, how do you vote below the line? How do you make Mr Conroy hear you? Happily, there’s an excellent website to help with that: Filter Conroy.
Yup. Mr Conroy, if you wouldn’t listen to the petition I signed or the thousands of technically competent people who have a list of completely solid reasons why this whole filtering thing is a really dumb idea, maybe you’ll listen when enough of us put you LAST and you lose your senate position…
