Bondi Cigar

Mar

11

Censorship’s Heartland

Kevin, it transpires, is quite an ole stick in the mud when conversation strays to arts, or civil liberties.

Not even being put in his place by Olympia abashed him the least on child nudity.

And a year into his government it continues, the most offensive advertising campaign of recent decades, that I naively believed would instantly topple with that rash of political trumpeting. Yes, those xenophobic pimping adverts with the Feds encouraging us to dob our neighbours in, or at least keep an eye on the bastards.

Now it’s revealed by a strange confluence of international cross-linking that our beloved saviour of all that’s good in the Labour ethos is hell bent on a icy contempt of free choice.

Introducing ACMA – your net-nanny

ACMA continues in the great tradition of Australian Customs and the Australian film censorship board as it compiles a blacklist of what THEY think YOU cannot visit on the Internet.

Web security vendor Sophos reports, disdainfully:

Well, Sophos Labs has acquired it .. our investigation has discovered that there are a number of sites on the published list which it would not be appropriate for us to protect customers against, as we have been unable to find any illegal or questionable content on their sites.
These include a Queensland dentist’s website, a caravan park, and webpages related to subjects as diverse as poker-playing and euthanasia.
Earlier this week, ACMA’s censorship list made headlines after it was revealed that it was blocking access to an anti-abortion website, and several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site, Wikileaks. “

Granny describes the kerfuffle quite nicely, and with an edge to her tone:

Banned hyperlinks could cost you $11,000 a day

Take note, all you webmasters.

And now the source, the fearless Wikileaks website:

Australia secretly censors Wikileaks press release

The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship.

In late 2008, Wikileaks released the secret Internet censorship list for Denmark, together with a press release condemning the practice for lack of public or judicial oversight.

An Australian anti-censorship activist submitted the page to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), requesting that they censor it, under their internal guidelines. The activist wished to expose the “slippery scope” of the proposed Mandatory Internet Censorship scheme.

The press release and the list itself have now been placed into the secret Australian government blacklist of “Prohibited Online Content. “

http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Australia_secretly_censors_Wikileaks_press_release_and_Danish_Internet_censorship_list,_16_Mar_2009

If we’re talking about mandates, these were not my voting intentions.

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At My Desk

Down Under

Travel in Asia, Pacific, Europe and the Americas reveals a affectionate admiration for the peoples and lifestyle of this great sunburnt country, this wide brown land.

Asians in particular regard us warmly, especially recalcitrant Muslim States to our north who accept our kindness and generosity with both awe and gratitude.

They view preemption nobly offered by our diminutively-revered former leader as that unique Australian blend of regional cooperation and derring-do.

Our Pacific neighbors, of whom we are proud paladins, play safely unmolested in our sunny watery back yard. The fuzzy wuzzy angels to our close north fondly consider us a rascally gang who altruistically saved their southern friends from another 40,000 years of stagnation.

To all strangers and foreign souls I extend the warm hand of welcome. And, too-long forgotten, particularly to those long-patient Territorians, and especially to our inland dwellers, those Arafura Pedestrians of Antiquity, our Native Australians.

Both our white outlanders and our indigenous tinted folk share with foreigners the misfortune of never having cherished the 'real Australia' - our sensuously skyward steely-glassed coastal cities fed by cascading combustion-powered rivers of commerce.

Girt by sea, this wide brown land black with coal, our wealth radiates around the globe to nations whose paucity of mere culture, education, and civilisation reflect back their envy .. which goes mostly over our heads, being deep within those loving excavations that pay for magical foreign-produced cargo cult goodies.

Obscenely sports obsessed being our badge of pride, a voratious public mind feasts on fast food of frenetic thronging presses of Press whose livelihoods depend upon screeching minutae of overpaid neanderthal derros with too much time on their talentless hands, unearned of such fabricated fame.

And, not least, this nation's grand sweep of creative intellectual fertility, that incubator of cultural and social promise - ethnic tribes of Sydney's great south-west, and the triple-mortgage trash of her far flung suburbs.