John Birmingham got it right over a year ago:

If parents are going to plug their kids into the net it is the parents’ responsibility to look after the little darlings while they’re online. You wouldn’t set a small child loose in the city and expect the government to step in and do your child-minding for you.

Oh, and I think you mean EFA (Electronic Frontiers Australia), not their US equivalent and inspiration EFF (Electronic Frontiers Foundation).

1. Will the list of banned sites be available via FOI for review by independent bodies (eg. EFF) in order to prevent misuse? If not, it’s the same as book-burning. FAIL.
2. Will the exact guidelines be publicly available, so everyone can see exactly what falls under this censorship (calling a spade a spade). If not, our rights are being wronged. FAIL.
3. Will it stop any kid seeing the results of the Google image search for “furries” (just try it). The answer will be no — technically impossible. But that’s the internet. If you don’t like it, don’t let your young children use it!

In my mind, parents who are worried about their young children seeing stuff on the internet should not let their kids use the internet. The internet is basically adult material — I think that should be clear by now.

If we look at it like that, a lot of the arguments for censorship become moot.

There’s certainly plenty of ways to deconstruct and critise the current “Phase 2″ filtering trials — not the least of which are that they’re not random double-blind trials, that there’s no independent audit or peer review, and that there are no pre-set criteria for success.

It really does seem to be a case of “Hey, just try something and tell us what happened.” Senator Conroy’s office can then just cherry-pick whatever numbers they find politically palatable and bury the rest.

In other words, the Rudd government’s claim to be using “evidence-based policy” is sadly just another cynical exercise in spin. They seem completely uninterested in using the established scientific, academic and forensic techniques for gathering and evaluating valid evidence. Pricks.