So anyway…

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I’m no fan of the (very conservative) Liberal Party, but I have to agree with them on this point:

Labor, they claimed, had comprehensively failed to deliver on cybersafety policies for children – and this failure was directly linked to Labor’s inability to let go of its obsession with its proposal to apply mandatory internet filtering to all Australian citizens accessing the internet.
 
The solution was flawed anyway, as even the Government had acknowledged that such a filter would be powerless to stop people circumventing it via proxy networks and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).

(Mind you, I don’t actually think it’s the government’s job to “deliver on cybersafety” for children or anyone else, but it is true that this Labor Government claimed they were going to do this and that to “protect children” and they’ve done diddly squat.)

And, yes, I keep mentioning this, but I think it bears repeating. If you’re in Victoria, vote below the line in the Senate and Put Conroy Last. There are “how to vote” forms on the Filter Conroy site now, so print one out, study it, and be prepared.

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The hypocrisy is breathtaking. After listening to two years of unambiguous opposition to the Internet filter proposal, Senator Conroy invariably falls back on the paedophile defence.
[...]
Q: What’s your personal view of the opt-out and opt-in provisions that could be added to the filter legislation are they a possibility or a good idea or…
 
Conroy: I’m not into opting into child porn.

I see. So, Senator Stephen Conroy, is it your position that everyone who opposes your filtering scheme is a paedophile? Are we all downloading and distributing child pornography, in your opinion?

How about this. I am one of your constituents. I voted Labour in the last election, and I put you into office. I sorely resent you bandying about this “child porn” banner whenever anyone opposes you. I particularly dislike you calling ME a child pornmonger or a paedophile or whatever it is you think I am because I – having ACTUAL technical skills and knowledge of how the internet works – oppose your poorly-conceived filtering scheme.

This filter WILL NOT WORK. It won’t protect any children from abuse. It won’t stop people from trading child pornography (which is, admittedly, reprehensible). It won’t do anything but cost millions of taxpayer dollars and slow down people’s internet connections. It won’t work.

So, Senator Stephen Conroy, STOP CALLING ME A PAEDOPHILE! STOP ACCUSING ME OF BEING INTO CHILD PORN! I oppose your filter because IT WON’T WORK. That does not mean I want to download child porn! You’re really pissing me off, mate!

Victorians, please, please, vote below the line and see to it that Stephen Conroy comes in DEAD LAST on election day. Here’s how: http://filter-conroy.org/.

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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…

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Well, this is all over the news in Australia, of course, but I know that some of the people who follow this blog aren’t Australian, and, anyway, I sometimes write about Australian politics here, so I’m going to do that.

We have a new Prime Minister, and it’s a woman, Julia Gillard. She was Deputy Prime Minister and now the party has decided they don’t want Kevin Rudd to lead any more, and he has resigned (rather than forcing a vote). I’m kind of fascinated by all of this, because it’s quite different from the U.S. system, where you’re damn well stuck with whomever it is until the next election. Here, the party can decide they don’t like the leader and can vote them out. I’ve seen it happen plenty of times with the party in opposition, but this is a first for me to see it with a sitting Prime Minister (it hasn’t happened in Australia for a long time, around twenty years). Very interesting business, this.

I also think I probably like Julia Gillard, but that does remain to be seen. I was pretty fed up with Kevin Rudd (as I’ve previously noted), and I utterly detest Tony Abbott. I was very much considering voting Green in the federal election, because I won’t vote for any party that Tony Abbott is leading, and I didn’t know if I could, in good conscience, cast a vote that would be an endorsement of Kevin Rudd. Now, I think I’ll probably support Labour and see how Gillard goes in the position, which is what I suspect a lot of Australians are thinking right about now.

So, there you go. Australia now has an unmarried, female, foreign-born, childless, redheaded, atheist Prime Minister. I guess we’ll see how we go.

As for Senator Stephen Conroy, currently (but probably not for long) Communications Minister who has been trying to push through manditory net nannying via a nationwide blacklist and who actually wanted Google to help Australia blacklist certain YouTube videos because “they do it for China”, I’m still pretty annoyed with him. He probably won’t be Communications Minister any more when the seats get shuffled around, but the man actually compared Australia with China’s draconian censorship laws and didn’t see a problem with that. (That’s the thing that bothers me. Not that stupid bill, or the ridiculous way they were trying to implement it, or the fact that it wasn’t going to work, anyway, but that Conroy actually seems to think China’s censorship is something we should look on favourably in Australia.) I think I’m still going to vote below the line and put Conroy last, just to send the message.

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The federal government is hiding controversial plans to force ISPs to store internet activity of all Australian internet users – regardless of whether they have been suspected of wrongdoing – for law-enforcement agencies to access.
[...]
Political opponents and other critics of the scheme have described the draft policy as “alarming” and accused the government of going “on a fishing expedition for as much data on the public as they can get”. One ISP executive has described the plan as “a nanny state gone totally insane”.

Note that this is not the “clean feed” scheme. It’s unrelated. This is just yet another example of the Rudd government’s idea of “reform”. Tax it, manage it, filter it, control it, waste a hell of a lot of money on it.

I don’t think this is going to fly, mind you, but just the idea that people in government would consider this in Australia is unnerving, to say the least.

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