The planned Internet censorship for Australia is an absolute disgrace and brings shame to an otherwise good Labor government.  After months of good Labor government, seeing a rise in respect for the democratic system among the younger generations who loathed John Howard, it is like a dagger in the spine from Senator Conroy, with the blessing of Prime Minister Rudd, to rip the heart out of the Internet’s inherent free speech.

Let’s be clear, the Internet is uncontrollable, after years of working in the IT industry, I can attest to that first hand, many ordinary Australians will also have first hand knowledge of this after paying good money for a AntiVirus software only to have their computer infected.  But don’t be disturbed, this is the way the Internet is supposed to be, this is the magic, the beauty of the Internet: it is an unfiltered repository of human knowledge.  To think that censoring the Internet under any circumstances has moral merit is ludicrous and insulting to the West’s most prized possession, freedom of speech.

By some estimates, the Rudd censorship plan could slow down the countries Internet by up to 85%.  Which hardly seems worth it considering it would take just 5 minutes to install TOR if one wanted to bypass the useless censor.  In other words, those who want to bypass the censor will be able to do it with ease, those who don’t even realise it’s there will suffer the consequences every day through decreased download speeds, and of course the occasional legitimate site which is blocked (such as the breast feeding site that was blocked in Parliament House using similar software).

The clean feed censorship software that the Rudd Labor government is planning on using to restrict our access to the world’s knowledge is the same software being run in Iran and China, where even though their Internet censorship laws include the prospect of arresting dissenting bloggers, it fails to work.  It fails miserably, in fact the inherent failures of Internet censorship have allowed the world insights into some of the most closed nations on Earth.  This was seen clearly in Burma, where during protests in 2007 our TV screens were flooded with images uploaded through the Internet and mobile phones.  It is impossible to successfully censor the Internet, yet Senator Conroy has his dirty hands on $44 million of our tax dollars ready to waste.  It wouldn’t even be so bad if he threw it down the drain, but to spend it ruining the countries Internet from a technical and moral standpoint is outright detrimental.

There is so much more I could rant about this issue, but these are some of the main points which particularly anger me I couldn’t wait to vent.  I’m sure if this doomed project gets off the ground I will have much more to say on the subject.  But for the moment, if you are as angry as I am about this Internet censorship, check out Stop The Clean Feed or email Senator Conroy at minister@dbcde.gov.au

Politics, Technology australia, censorship, clean feed, internet, kevin rudd, Politics, Technology

Dear Kevin,

It is now a little over a year since this country swept you into office on the back of 12 shameful but prosperous years under Howard.  You have offered and fulfilled your promises honourably, yet I can’t help to feel, conservatively.  When you campaigned on an Education Revolution, you surely weren’t referring to incremental baby steps for a 20 year revamp of the education system?  I was rather more hoping that the ‘revolution’ part of your catch phrase meant we were in for a rollercoaster overhaul of an education system in dire need.  I’m quite sure that many people who saw the degredation of our schools throughout the Howard years expected the same.  The mandate is there Mr. Rudd and you would be crazy not to act on it because after the next election cycle, people may not be so interested anymore.

So the world’s been thrown into a bit of a global recession since then and you may not be so keen to spend the little money you now realise you have.  I say, whip out the credit card and build us 21st century infrastructure, sideline the blame game and get spending!  Build hospitals and roads… but most importantly build public schools and accessible universities that are at the forefront of world education.  No century old blackboards and crumbling walls, but modern class rooms with technology embedded into the learning process, making Australian students the best trained in the world.  Nothing goes as far towards nation building as a world class public education system and you were given the mandate for an education revolution Mr. Rudd, please don’t pass it up.

Politics australia, education, education revolution, kevin rudd, labor, Politics

Governments are the most powerful entities in the world we live in.  They only exist to serve the people they represent, unfortunately history has shown us, they are also the most likely to violate our rights, our privacy and our freedom.  This is why human rights are essential to protect the citizenry from its most likely oppressor, its government.

Australia is the only western liberal democracy that does not have a charter or bill of rights.  This may change in the near future as the new Rudd Labor government supports it, however the argument that has until now stopped the creation of a Charter of Rights goes something like this: “unelected judges shouldn’t be able to limit elected officials decisions”.  This is a terribly misguided argument, because it assumes that elected officials always act for the good of everybody (as opposed to what will win them some votes).  Judges have much less vested interest in the outcome of a human rights case than the politicians do.  In Australia,  mandatory detention of refugees (including children) and the wrongful detention without trial of Dr. Haneef under terrorism suspicion show that governments can often win the majority vote by picking on the minority.

Perhaps to understand this, the idea of democracy has to be quickly reconsidered.  We do not live in a Democracy, we live in a Liberal Democracy, popularly considered the same thing, but in reality very different.  Democracy is majority rules, Liberalism is individual liberty.  In ancient Rome, they fed Jews to the lions for the majority Romans entertainment, if they had taken a vote on it, the majority would have said it was ok to feed the minority to wild beasts.  In Australia up until the 1970’s the majority voted in governments who instituted a policy of taking the minority Indigenous children from their parents and raising them in white Christian schools.  In Rwanda in 1994, the majority Hutu’s of the country ganged up and massacred up to a million minority Tutsi’s, if they had taken a vote on the genocide, it would have passed with a large majority.  We live in a Liberal Democracy, which means that although its essentially majority rules, we should never undermine the basic liberal and minority rights of society.

Every death caused by war, every wrongful imprisonment, every wire-tap, every person who is banned from speaking, writing or praying about what he choses are caused by governments.  Governments are the most powerful entities on Earth, and to claim that we should trust them beyond encoding some basic protections of our (liberal) human rights is at best misguided, and at worst sinister.

Australia urgently needs a Charter of Human Rights.

Politics australia, charter of rights, democracy, human rights, liberalism, Politics