Spiked Online, a UK publication with the modest ambition of making history as well as reporting it, has published three articles on Australia’s net censorship plan.
Guy Rundle gives a detailed run down of the proposal and its conservative connections in his article, Tear down Australia’s Great Firewall Reef (c’mon Guy, it’s Great Barrier Web). Rundle writes:
There is nothing ‘Family First’ about a policy that deprives parents of the right to decide on what comes into their homes via the internet and puts it in the hands of the state instead. But of course, ‘Family First’ is about something else – the imposition of a conservative Christian morality across the whole of Australian society.
In ‘Digital Natives’ take on censorious Kevin, Danu Poyner shares his experience in the ongoing fight to stop mandatory filtering:
From the moment the geeks heard about the so-called ‘clean feed’, we went to arms. We fought it on blogs and on forums, on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. This was to be a war on our own turf, and we were ready. Angry geeks may not sound so scary, especially when pitted against a government armed with a large majority and a powerful decoy like ‘protecting the children’, but what they didn’t count on was the very strength of the force they were trying to muzzle. We were connected.
While Kerry Miller investigates the role Clive Hamilton and the Australia Institute has played:
With regard to pornography, Hamilton casts his net quite wide. He uses the bogeyman of child porn to provoke moral outrage (despite the fact that child porn is already illegal and, since it is hidden, no-one sees it ‘accidentally’), and then hitches a ride on this to condemn almost all other porn. Michael Flood has even mooted the idea of an ‘ethical porn’, which depicts people engaged in ‘normal loving sexual behaviour’. The availability of material which shows men ejaculating on women’s faces, double penetration, male-female anal sex, bondage or simulated rape scenes is seen as just obviously socially dangerous. ‘Normal’ sex, as defined by Hamilton and his supporters, should be… well, I don’t know quite what, but certainly very politically correct and restrained. It seems that the liberal censors would like the government to find a way of censoring sexual fantasies, and imposing the ‘correct line’ on sex.
