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Australian Government to impose mandatory nationalwide internet filtering
Well they've basically admitted that anyone who wants to and knows enough will be able to circumvent it. The press statement said something about protecting those who don't know how to protect themselves, which makes you wonder why they don't just make it opt out if that's what they're aiming for.
EDIT: Not that it would matter in my electorate anyway.
Yeah, we're not known as Aus' Deep South for nothing. SEQ has the highest concentration of weird backyard snake-charming hysterical-fundie tent churches and the Gold Coast is simultaneously the cocaine capital of the country.
You do realize that this is one thing DNS is specifically designed NOT to be used for, right? Perfectly reasonable my ass. Every time some fucking idiot plays with DNS records god kills a nest of kittens.
Also, people seem to be focusing on the fact that the law is currently unenforceable due to technological limitations. Not good, the precedent is the problem, not the feasibility at the moment.
reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
edited December 2009
In Finland, in addition to child porn they decided to filter out some gambling sites and quite a few sites that are critical of the government or the filter itself. Also, atleast last I checked, there was absolutely no kind of appeals process in case your site did get filtered.
So, yay democracy?
I guess someone might've mentioned that already since this thread is apparently pretty old.
I love this. The government is spending my tax dollars on a scheme which I oppose, and one that can be wholly circumvented by me setting up my Linux server to run as a DNS server. Heck, my net would probably even by faster as a result of this(there would only be a few milliseconds in it, but it's still a swing in the right direction).
Ugh. Just ugh.
Adross on
Human knowledge belongs to the world
0
Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
edited December 2009
Let's be clear here that ONE way of looking at the results of the Telstra results is that 10000 results gives a mere increase of 0.5ms per DNS request. Of course, the other way of looking at that is it's about a 20% increase in the amount and the reduction in QPS is also in the order of 20%.
That's in a test environment.
The warnings it gives are horrendous - high traffic sites will lead to vastly increased response times.
Crazy shit as. I love that they specify that you can get around it by VPN (like that wasn't already clear). As if any child pornographers in Australia or exporting their wares to Australia didn't already use encryption technologies and VPNs you can guarantee that they will be doing so now. Way to make prosecuting such things things 10 time more difficult.
As usual, too stupid to work.
Though, recently it's been said that the gvernment won't be maintaining the list anymore, an independent international organisation will do so. Which will almost definitely be the same one operating in the U.K. who blocked wikipedia for a few months, amongst other things.
Apothe0sis on
0
Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
On plus side it sounds like getting around it is just going to require using OpenDNS rather then your ISP's DNS. At worst it'll involve someone putting an app together that encrypts DNS requests to an out-of-country DNS server, but then everything else will run at full speed.
I read it as blocking internet DNS traffic not approved by the filter overlords, so OpenDNS is out.
I love that they specify that you can get around it by VPN (like that wasn't already clear). As if any child pornographers in Australia or exporting their wares to Australia didn't already use encryption technologies and VPNs you can guarantee that they will be doing so now. Way to make prosecuting such things things 10 time more difficult.
I remember reading an interesting observation by someone from the ACPO in the UK on this. He said that, surprisingly enough, they don't run into encryption or other security technology very often when investigating child porn cases, despite its relative ease-of-use these days.
What they do find, is that the people they end up prosecuting have often installed the software and played around with it, then gone back to saving mpgs to their desktop.
On plus side it sounds like getting around it is just going to require using OpenDNS rather then your ISP's DNS. At worst it'll involve someone putting an app together that encrypts DNS requests to an out-of-country DNS server, but then everything else will run at full speed.
I read it as blocking internet DNS traffic not approved by the filter overlords, so OpenDNS is out.
Of course, this is incredibly intrusive...
That's what they claim, yes.
In any planned deployment Telstra would prevent customer access to non-Telstra DNS, thus
eliminating an alternate DNS circumvention.
On plus side it sounds like getting around it is just going to require using OpenDNS rather then your ISP's DNS. At worst it'll involve someone putting an app together that encrypts DNS requests to an out-of-country DNS server, but then everything else will run at full speed.
I read it as blocking internet DNS traffic not approved by the filter overlords, so OpenDNS is out.
Of course, this is incredibly intrusive...
Right, but this wouldn't be DNS traffic. I'm talking about a probably custom app - you effectively encrypt your DNS traffic and send it over port 443 out of the country, but then can use conventional traffic to receive everything.
It would be unstoppable since it would indistinguishable to regular traffic. Sure they could probably fuck with the ability to find the original server, but that would quickly scale the system into unusability, particularly when you factor in all the refinements to specifically dodging this type of thing that BitTorrent has given us.
Basically a proxy server for your DNS that doesn't proxy anything else. Hell I can probably do this right now if I play around with FoxyProxy.
You can't use DNS in that way. You're talking about an SSH tunnel and you'll still need your own remote server.
I love that they specify that you can get around it by VPN (like that wasn't already clear). As if any child pornographers in Australia or exporting their wares to Australia didn't already use encryption technologies and VPNs you can guarantee that they will be doing so now. Way to make prosecuting such things things 10 time more difficult.
I remember reading an interesting observation by someone from the ACPO in the UK on this. He said that, surprisingly enough, they don't run into encryption or other security technology very often when investigating child porn cases, despite its relative ease-of-use these days.
What they do find, is that the people they end up prosecuting have often installed the software and played around with it, then gone back to saving mpgs to their desktop.
Yah, it's not like pedos also know how to fiddle with computers.
You can proxy DNS traffic. Presumably you can mangle the packets such that the IP address to talk to maps back to your own computer, rather then the proxy server.
The SSH tunnel is just so the gubmint can't inspect your outgoing DNS packets.
If I understand correctly what you describe, you need remote server with ssh access, ssh client, starting the client as a SOCKS proxy on localhost and forwarding DNS traffic through it.
My point was, getting VPN is easier and probably cheaper and in both cases you'll need to spend to circumvent.
I'd rather vote the people who backed this out of power and repel this BS law.
Okay, so speaking as someone who has lived in actual countries with totally filtered but nonetheless working internet access -
It is technologically possible and presents little barrier to Internet access, as long as you don't intend to build a North-Korea style information control system, just a system capable of blocking certain sites when domestic pressure builds for you to do so.
Blocking porn is impossible, as has been pointed out. However, blocking specific websites when conservative groups complain about them is possible. This list of blocked websites is likely to grow very long.
Political abuse is likely. The thing is that certain websites are interesting only part of the time, and the Streisand Effect doesn't necessarily go far enough in assisting the spread of information. Say you've got the Aussie equivalent of Kos or Powerline or what have you, suddenly dropping a hit piece on the incumbent party on the eve of an election. Whoops, there goes your internet access. Totally unrelated, I'm sure. Must be those randomly-selected adult ads on the sidebar that triggered it, eh?
Which can ensure that any opposition interesting enough to do damage, but not interesting enough to be passed around the Internet like wildfire, simply have no effect. A careful politician will still use this to keep track of levels of unhappiness. On the other hand, if your politicians are stupid, cue a slide towards a point where news does become interesting enough to keep being passed around the Internet (and you don't want to live in such an interesting world, to say the least).
You don't have to be a third world hellhole to pull this kind of bullshit; you know there are large political groups who would celebrate if some opposition website they see as pulling scummy tactics to oppose them suddenly fell off the Internet.
And, naturally, sites that did solely have material that would be censored would attempt to include political content to deflect the censor, further muddying the distinction between political and objectionable material.
Internet filtering. Alex Hawke I understand is saying that he is one of several Liberals that will vote against any legislation on internet filtering. What is the Opposition’s view on that?
TONY ABBOTT:
Well look, we haven’t seen the legislation okay, and we won’t be seeing it for quite some time. In principle, and this is just a personal view, but in principle I think that it makes sense to try to ensure that we don’t have pornography of the worst kind coming into homes through the internet, coming into homes without appropriate parental supervision and knowledge. So in principle I think that it is fair enough to try to ensure that Australian families are protected from the worst sorts of pornography. But we haven’t seen the legislation. We don’t know just how practical it is going to be and we’ll have a position on this once we see the legislation.
Any reason to vote liberal disappeared with abbott's ascendancy. And I swear I saw him dissing the net-ban legislation less than two days ago. He'll say anything.
Abbot almost certainly won't vote against the bill. Turnbull would've ( =( ), Abbot not a chance. Best you can hope for is they force some amendments through to fufill Abbot's idiotic perception that the Opposition must oppose "just 'cause". Any opposition we get from them will be based upon this rather than any sort of Libertarian / small government tendencies.
The filter seems to be getting quite a lot of negative press. One uncredited editorial in The Australian (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/turning-the-muck-filter-on/story-e6frg71x-1225811211787) was incredibly pro-filter, but on the other hand the Sydney Morning Herald as well as some international media took a rather negative stance. The 7pm project just then had an interview with some bloke from the Electronic Frontiers Australia who obviously took a very negative approach too.
I was feeling pretty goddam pessemistic about the chance that any major sway in public opinion could actually make an effect yesterday, but it looks like the opposition is mounting ; can't be a bad thing.
You realize this is a paper that printed an editorial that said that Bush was a great president because he was better than Osama Bin Laden. And that there should be no "standard of excellence" for running the free world.
You realize this is a paper that printed an editorial that said that Bush was a great president because he was better than Osama Bin Laden. And that there should be no "standard of excellence" for running the free world.
Oh god yes, I abhor The Australian. I get the weekend edition free every week from Uni, and I usually do read it. My blood often boils. I have a tendency to read both far right and far left sources (and generally moronic sources as well, evidenced by the fact that I actually take the time to read the Australian :P).
I was thinking it a bit up in the air as to which tack exactly the conservative media would take though. "Dey takin' away your rights" is a pretty big pull to a lot of right wingers (not that "somebody think of the children" isn't also of course). I think Fox (US) ran a story along the lines of "Australia joins China and Iran in filtering the Internet!!!".
I'm still pretty miffed the article was uncredited though, I'd like to know who we can thank for spreading flat out lies and falsehoods to readers. :?
I actually read the Australian because I consider the standard of Journalism higher than anything else I can get, I just take the time to consider what is being said.
Also, it covers Rugby and Football as much as AFL.
Any reason to vote liberal disappeared with abbott's ascendancy. And I swear I saw him dissing the net-ban legislation less than two days ago. He'll say anything.
He'll say anything the ACL tell him to. All they need to do is shove the fist a bit deeper into their little puppet.
Any reason to vote liberal disappeared with abbott's ascendancy. And I swear I saw him dissing the net-ban legislation less than two days ago. He'll say anything.
He'll say anything the ACL tell him to. All they need to do is shove the fist a bit deeper into their little puppet.
To be fair, they have their fair share of influence over Rudd too.
Any reason to vote liberal disappeared with abbott's ascendancy. And I swear I saw him dissing the net-ban legislation less than two days ago. He'll say anything.
He'll say anything the ACL tell him to. All they need to do is shove the fist a bit deeper into their little puppet.
To be fair, they have their fair share of influence over Rudd too.
Unfortunately yes, they seem to have fundies in both major parties willing to tow their line. Several members of the Greens even seem to agree with the policy, not that I'd vote for those whack jobs in any case. It's either fundies who know what's best for us or eco-terrorists who seem to get the most votes. We are pretty well screwed no matter what. Though if the National party were to break away from the Liberals again, it may get interesting....
Any reason to vote liberal disappeared with abbott's ascendancy. And I swear I saw him dissing the net-ban legislation less than two days ago. He'll say anything.
He'll say anything the ACL tell him to. All they need to do is shove the fist a bit deeper into their little puppet.
To be fair, they have their fair share of influence over Rudd too.
Unfortunately yes, they seem to have fundies in both major parties willing to tow their line. Several members of the Greens even seem to agree with the policy, not that I'd vote for those whack jobs in any case. It's either fundies who know what's best for us or eco-terrorists who seem to get the most votes. We are pretty well screwed no matter what. Though if the National party were to break away from the Liberals again, it may get interesting....
I recently had to vote in the Higgins bi-election (Costello's old seat) and I voted green. Labor didn't even run a candidate, and hell if I'm voting any party with Abbot as their leader.
I think Green party line will end up against the filter, almost certainly. Perhaps a few dissenters, but they have absolutely nothing to gain by supporting it, and once you take away political mitigating factors it makes a lot more sense for them to try pick up the under-25 vote on the matter.
Personally I like the greens. They suffer from the same fate as any other political party on some matters (such as having to be ridiculously anti-nuclear to appease the enviro-hippies) but I think socially they take the right tack on a lot of stuff. They're the closest thing to the Democrats before they collapsed ("Keep the bastards honest").
JOURNALISTS tend to adopt a natural default position whereby censorship is deemed to be one of the purest forms of evil and that we should fight any government that tries to curtail the freedom of adults to make up their own minds on what they say, watch and read.
During the past few months I've found that my personal default position has been challenged, oddly enough, by the anti-censorship lobby. Lobby is a bit of a loose term -- there is no formal lobby as such -- it's a pretty diverse and disorganised conglomeration of humanity, containing authors, artists, journalists, information technology experts, social media enthusiasts, twitterers and the like.
Large -- and in my view, largely stupid -- sections of this group have had the surprise effect of turning me into a closet fan of Communications Minister Stephen Conroy.
Not because his internet filtering plan is a work of genius. Far from it. It is worrying that we are adopting a mandatory system when European democracies have opted for a voluntary one, where internet service providers can decide whether to use the government-operated nanny system to prevent access to dodgy sites.
It's even more alarming that the system will (obviously) involve automation -- and as anyone who has a firewall at their workplace knows, these systems are notoriously unreliable, often preventing access to innocuous material while failing to block actual smut.
As the leaked "black list" of banned sites revealed earlier this year, even though it was only a working draft, some innocent arty sites and some credible journalism about scandals such as the Bill Henson affair were caught up in the initial version of this system. But for all these serious flaws and complicated questions, the anti-censorship brigade in my view has turned Conroy into something of a hero for decency and civility.
This is because the arguments being mounted against his plan -- and specifically against him, as for some unfathomable reason this has become a bitchy personal campaign -- fall into three woeful categories: the historically inaccurate, the deliberately incorrect and the morally ambivalent.
If you want to get a close look at a generation of pampered kids that has never known repression, and knows little of history, open a Twitter account and type in the words #cleanfeed.
Earlier this year they were taping up their mouths with black duct tape in protest against what they saw as a blanket attack on their web freedoms.
Now they are redoing their avatars (computer headshots) to run "No Clean Feed" under their faces as they casually compare the conduct of the Rudd government with the dictatorships in China, Iran, Burma and the former Soviet bloc. It's like they're getting off on the idea that this is their Tiananmen moment, the small difference being that at no stage will a tank come crashing through the study Mum and Dad built at their eastern suburbs bungalow when they did the renovations in 2006, just as young Hamish was starting his communications degree.
These ahistorical misrepresentations have found a voice beyond the Twitter crowd and the perpetratiors have been egged on by members of the Coalition, jurists such as Michael Kirby and publishers who should really know more about history than to make such a dumb comparison. It's not only an absurd distortion of government intent, it's a rotten insult to those who have been tortured and killed in those countries for trying to exercise their freedom of speech.
The thing that helps steer these censorship campaigners towards historical inaccuracy -- aside from their strange fantasies of political persecution in their otherwise drab bourgeois existence -- is the outright lies that are being told about how the system will work.
It has been said repeatedly that the government will be able to draw up its own list and declare on a whim that a particular site must be shut down.
This has been extrapolated out into any number of worst-case scenarios, along the absurdist lines seen with biker gangs or terrorist groups.
You know the logic -- "If the government can ban the Hells Angels or al-Qa'ida, what's to stop them banning the local Rotary Club?" (Apart from common sense, constitutionally guaranteed elections and the small fact the Rotary Club doesn't sell speed and didn't claim responsibility for September 11.)
From everything I have read by people who have actually looked at the proposals, the government itself will have no power to ban any website. Rather, the decisions of the independent classifications board -- which already determines which movies, books and magazines we consume -- will be extended to include the same content online.
And it's squalid stuff -- and only squalid stuff -- that is being talked about. Child porn, bestiality, rape fantasies, women being beaten up; the sort of stuff that you'd think any self-respecting left-winger should be actively campaigning against.
Despite the hideous nature of what is being targeted, it is depressingly easy to find an absolutist anti-censorship mindset out there. It enjoyed one of its best expressions earlier this year on ABC1's Q&A, on a night when despite that program's (genuine) attempts to achieve an ideologically diverse audience, the crowd appeared to be evenly split between communists under 25, and communists over 65.
Conroy was perched on the stage with the black hat, with conservative columnist Andrew Bolt playing a dastardly support role. And it was Bolt who, to his credit, took to task fellow panellist Louise Adler, from Melbourne University Press, over her quite stunning declaration that pretty much anything should be published and we could then battle it out in the contest of ideas.
"What I find reprehensible, you don't," Adler said to Bolt. "What you find unpalatable, I don't. I want to fight you in the public sphere."
Bolt challenged Adler as to where -- or whether -- she would draw a line.
"So nothing at all should be banned?" he asked.
She replied:"May a thousand ideas bloom and let's contest them because that's what tells us that our democracy is robust."
Tellingly, host Tony Jones got a huge and unsolicited cheer from the audience when he asked Conroy hypothetically if there were anything in the legislation that could prevent Bolt's column from being published.
The crowd gave the game away there.
They did it again on our website The Punch this week, where we ran a thoughtful piece by journalist Alexandra Carlton suggesting that the need to eliminate child porn was more important than blanket net freedom, only to face attack from anti-censorship campaigners for having the temerity to publish something with which they disagreed.
I believe the version that ran in the Australian today was edited (Slightly) and removed some of the thoughtful stuff so it came across as totally hard line. But it is still pretty shitty.
I can't be bothered arguing against it but a few points should be raised:
The Film and Literature board is retarded.
Michael Kirby, one of the great Australian legal minds of a generation, a man who voted AGAINST the rest of the high court when they wanted to imprison a stateless person indefinitely, OBVIOUSLY goes into arguments half baked and NEVER considers what he is saying. (Sarcasm)
The reason we compare it to Iran etc is because THEY HAVE INTERNET CENSORSHIP YOU MORON. CAN WE NOT COMPARE THINGS TO OTHER THINGS THAT ARE ALIKE?
Sounds to be like another fuck who thinks "Eh? Internet? Who uses that for anything other than that youtubebook? I have a phone, a letterbox and my trusty horse Derrick, and that's all we really need."
The Internet is a communications device, eventually it will become the communications device. It renders the telephone and posting letters obsolete. Our freedom to communicate will be limited by a group of old men I don't really know, and it absolutely shouldn't be.
The concept that this person finds anyone else to be "largely stupid" is hilarious.
Posts
Yeah, we're not known as Aus' Deep South for nothing. SEQ has the highest concentration of weird backyard snake-charming hysterical-fundie tent churches and the Gold Coast is simultaneously the cocaine capital of the country.
You do realize that this is one thing DNS is specifically designed NOT to be used for, right? Perfectly reasonable my ass. Every time some fucking idiot plays with DNS records god kills a nest of kittens.
Also, people seem to be focusing on the fact that the law is currently unenforceable due to technological limitations. Not good, the precedent is the problem, not the feasibility at the moment.
Welcome to the New South Wales state election, you can choose between the corrupt arseholes in power or the arseholes who's policies you hate.
So, yay democracy?
I guess someone might've mentioned that already since this thread is apparently pretty old.
Ugh. Just ugh.
That's in a test environment.
The warnings it gives are horrendous - high traffic sites will lead to vastly increased response times.
Crazy shit as. I love that they specify that you can get around it by VPN (like that wasn't already clear). As if any child pornographers in Australia or exporting their wares to Australia didn't already use encryption technologies and VPNs you can guarantee that they will be doing so now. Way to make prosecuting such things things 10 time more difficult.
As usual, too stupid to work.
Though, recently it's been said that the gvernment won't be maintaining the list anymore, an independent international organisation will do so. Which will almost definitely be the same one operating in the U.K. who blocked wikipedia for a few months, amongst other things.
I read it as blocking internet DNS traffic not approved by the filter overlords, so OpenDNS is out.
Of course, this is incredibly intrusive...
Same here, recently it seems like state Labor has been doing their very best to get themselves voted out of off.
I remember reading an interesting observation by someone from the ACPO in the UK on this. He said that, surprisingly enough, they don't run into encryption or other security technology very often when investigating child porn cases, despite its relative ease-of-use these days.
What they do find, is that the people they end up prosecuting have often installed the software and played around with it, then gone back to saving mpgs to their desktop.
That's what they claim, yes.
You can't use DNS in that way. You're talking about an SSH tunnel and you'll still need your own remote server.
Yah, it's not like pedos also know how to fiddle with computers.
If I understand correctly what you describe, you need remote server with ssh access, ssh client, starting the client as a SOCKS proxy on localhost and forwarding DNS traffic through it.
My point was, getting VPN is easier and probably cheaper and in both cases you'll need to spend to circumvent.
I'd rather vote the people who backed this out of power and repel this BS law.
It is technologically possible and presents little barrier to Internet access, as long as you don't intend to build a North-Korea style information control system, just a system capable of blocking certain sites when domestic pressure builds for you to do so.
Blocking porn is impossible, as has been pointed out. However, blocking specific websites when conservative groups complain about them is possible. This list of blocked websites is likely to grow very long.
Political abuse is likely. The thing is that certain websites are interesting only part of the time, and the Streisand Effect doesn't necessarily go far enough in assisting the spread of information. Say you've got the Aussie equivalent of Kos or Powerline or what have you, suddenly dropping a hit piece on the incumbent party on the eve of an election. Whoops, there goes your internet access. Totally unrelated, I'm sure. Must be those randomly-selected adult ads on the sidebar that triggered it, eh?
Which can ensure that any opposition interesting enough to do damage, but not interesting enough to be passed around the Internet like wildfire, simply have no effect. A careful politician will still use this to keep track of levels of unhappiness. On the other hand, if your politicians are stupid, cue a slide towards a point where news does become interesting enough to keep being passed around the Internet (and you don't want to live in such an interesting world, to say the least).
You don't have to be a third world hellhole to pull this kind of bullshit; you know there are large political groups who would celebrate if some opposition website they see as pulling scummy tactics to oppose them suddenly fell off the Internet.
And, naturally, sites that did solely have material that would be censored would attempt to include political content to deflect the censor, further muddying the distinction between political and objectionable material.
I'll eat a cock if they don't pass this.
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The filter seems to be getting quite a lot of negative press. One uncredited editorial in The Australian (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/turning-the-muck-filter-on/story-e6frg71x-1225811211787) was incredibly pro-filter, but on the other hand the Sydney Morning Herald as well as some international media took a rather negative stance. The 7pm project just then had an interview with some bloke from the Electronic Frontiers Australia who obviously took a very negative approach too.
I was feeling pretty goddam pessemistic about the chance that any major sway in public opinion could actually make an effect yesterday, but it looks like the opposition is mounting ; can't be a bad thing.
EDIT :: Youtube link to 7pm project interview I mentioned. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhAJgrISMrI
You realize this is a paper that printed an editorial that said that Bush was a great president because he was better than Osama Bin Laden. And that there should be no "standard of excellence" for running the free world.
Oh god yes, I abhor The Australian. I get the weekend edition free every week from Uni, and I usually do read it. My blood often boils. I have a tendency to read both far right and far left sources (and generally moronic sources as well, evidenced by the fact that I actually take the time to read the Australian :P).
I was thinking it a bit up in the air as to which tack exactly the conservative media would take though. "Dey takin' away your rights" is a pretty big pull to a lot of right wingers (not that "somebody think of the children" isn't also of course). I think Fox (US) ran a story along the lines of "Australia joins China and Iran in filtering the Internet!!!".
I'm still pretty miffed the article was uncredited though, I'd like to know who we can thank for spreading flat out lies and falsehoods to readers. :?
Also, it covers Rugby and Football as much as AFL.
He'll say anything the ACL tell him to. All they need to do is shove the fist a bit deeper into their little puppet.
To be fair, they have their fair share of influence over Rudd too.
Unfortunately yes, they seem to have fundies in both major parties willing to tow their line. Several members of the Greens even seem to agree with the policy, not that I'd vote for those whack jobs in any case. It's either fundies who know what's best for us or eco-terrorists who seem to get the most votes. We are pretty well screwed no matter what. Though if the National party were to break away from the Liberals again, it may get interesting....
I recently had to vote in the Higgins bi-election (Costello's old seat) and I voted green. Labor didn't even run a candidate, and hell if I'm voting any party with Abbot as their leader.
I think Green party line will end up against the filter, almost certainly. Perhaps a few dissenters, but they have absolutely nothing to gain by supporting it, and once you take away political mitigating factors it makes a lot more sense for them to try pick up the under-25 vote on the matter.
Personally I like the greens. They suffer from the same fate as any other political party on some matters (such as having to be ridiculously anti-nuclear to appease the enviro-hippies) but I think socially they take the right tack on a lot of stuff. They're the closest thing to the Democrats before they collapsed ("Keep the bastards honest").
I believe the version that ran in the Australian today was edited (Slightly) and removed some of the thoughtful stuff so it came across as totally hard line. But it is still pretty shitty.
I can't be bothered arguing against it but a few points should be raised:
The Film and Literature board is retarded.
Michael Kirby, one of the great Australian legal minds of a generation, a man who voted AGAINST the rest of the high court when they wanted to imprison a stateless person indefinitely, OBVIOUSLY goes into arguments half baked and NEVER considers what he is saying. (Sarcasm)
The reason we compare it to Iran etc is because THEY HAVE INTERNET CENSORSHIP YOU MORON. CAN WE NOT COMPARE THINGS TO OTHER THINGS THAT ARE ALIKE?
The Internet is a communications device, eventually it will become the communications device. It renders the telephone and posting letters obsolete. Our freedom to communicate will be limited by a group of old men I don't really know, and it absolutely shouldn't be.
The concept that this person finds anyone else to be "largely stupid" is hilarious.
God fucking dammit.
I guess politicians are retarded even in Australia.
Politicians are retarded everywhere. Everywhere.
Welcome to the country, though.
Old PA forum lookalike style for the new forums | My ko-fi donation thing.
Get used to calling people Mate.
Welcome to our happy paradise!