Comments on: Conroy’s continued lies and gaffes

By: Stilgherrian · Episode 42 online, with a predictable Cnut

Stilgherrian · Episode 42 online, with a predictable Cnut — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:21:29 +0000

[...] Well, after the nominations we received, it was predictable. SlideShare received just 4% of the vote, presumably by the SlideShare users affected by their April Fools’ Day stunt. I received 27% for my own stunt — even though I maintain that Whirlpool started it. And even Senator Stephen Conroy only scored 29% for his performance this week. [...]

By: Fitzroyalty

Fitzroyalty — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 02:29:38 +0000

I’m still severely annoyed I didn’t make the shortlist to be on the show after giving the producer a lot of background material by phone. This was one of the worst Insight episodes – repetitive, poorly edited and far too deferential to the minister who waffled and could never give a straight answer to a straight question.

The only worthwhile contribution came from Fiona Patton for exposing the absurdity of a particular kind of content receiving a different classification based on the delivery format, eg being X18+ in print, but RC on VHS or DVD. This will never work for the web.

I like kink and it is easily available online. The suggestion clearly is that what is now available online will be denied to us in future. And the Classification board will soon have a staff of thousands… of conservative christian losers like Conroy who will criminalise media about harmless behaviour between consenting adults.

By: Stilgherrian

Stilgherrian — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:31:21 +0000

@Eric TF Bat: There's an idea for a nice article there, for publication on some suitable demi-anniversary of the election. That'd be June 2009. @anthony: This is a point I do want to return to some time. If we don't know, specifically, what we are doing, how the hell can we be conducting a "field test" or "pilot" of it? As iiNet has already pointed out, DBCDE wasn't interested in a double-blind trial -- which means the results likely to be unrepresentative. Once again, it proves that despite the Rudd government's oft-repeated mantra of "evidence-based policy", they're not actually interested in real evidence, just some bunch of numbers which they can cherry-pick and use in PR.

By: anthony

anthony — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:53:09 +0000

The thing that kills me is Conroy’s approach of “We don’t know what it is exactly we want to filter, but let’s figure out if we can filter it first”. Um. What.

On the plus side, there was very little of Bernadette and that ACL tool on the televised report. That’s a good thing for civil discourse.

By: Eric TF Bat

Eric TF Bat — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:11:13 +0000

I’m loving that point you made about Conroy obviously not wanting to be remembered for this. Interestingly, I got this print-out from the Wikipedia entry on the Australian Government of 2007-2010, that fell through a wormhole from a hundred years in the future. In the list of notable ministers and their contributions to the government, it said:

Kevin Rudd: no idea.
Julia Gillard: who?
Wayne Swan: buggered if I know.
Peter Garrett: wasn’t he a singer? Beats me.
Stephen Conroy: bastard who tried to destroy the internet.
Other ministers: not sure.

The article was marked as a stub though, so maybe someone could pop up to 2109 AD and edit it?