Dangerous website censorship plan fails protection test

8 March 2010

Last Saturday in the unlikely venue of historic Parramatta Park over 50 people gathered for the Sydney leg of the nationwide protests against federal Labor's plans to censor internet use by blocking certain websites. 

Watch Lee address the crowd on YouTube

In speaking to the crowd I detailed that the Greens are strongly committed to making the internet safe for children but the way forward is to supervise and educate young people about web usage not go for the unworkable ban plan.

My federal colleague Senator Scott Ludlam is about to present a petition calling on the Senate to not pass this legislation. If you are quick you can still add your name to the list. Read about Scott's work.

This is one of those issues that deserves wide public debate to provide some counter balance to the myopic view of Communications Minister Stephen Conroy whose speeches on this issue suggest faith in the impossible.

The government plan that also has the enthusiastic backing of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd would be a complaints based system that would rely on a secret list of banned web addresses and force all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block sites on this list. This article  by Canberra software engineer Arved von Brasch details the problems with the Conroy plan.

The legislation is due to come before the federal parliament in about one month. The word from Canberra is that some of the younger MPs in both Labor and the Liberals are warning their party leaderships that they are out of touch and any attempt to censor the net across the country will not succeed in its objectives and will bring considerable embarrassment to the government and this country.

Now we need to amplify community opposition to help ensure this ill-conceived plan fails. At the Sydney rally there was discussion on campaign tactics, how to find new allies and the language of the campaign. I raised that I don't think most people understand what we mean by “No filter” and “No clean feed”. We need to redefine our concerns so our message translates to the 10 second grab and the short phrase for web based campaigning and hard copy leaflets.

There have been some twitter conversations about the language we use. I would welcome to hear your thoughts.

Lee Rhiannon