“My preferred term is that we’re governed by Hallucinating Goldfish. No long-term memory, and a world of imagined horrors,” I said last night.

My comment was triggered by a discussion about Australia’s debt-to-GDP ratio, which stands at 6%. Here’s a picture from March 2010, showing that even with the recent rise in debt to deal with the global financial crisis our government is debt still within the usual range historically.

Personal debt, on the other hand… Ahem!

The United States, by comparison, sits at 60%. According to one economist even that figure is wrong. It’s really 14 times greater, and he reckons the US is actually bankrupt.

But opposition parties here in Australia screech that 6% is “out of control” — even though, as Ric Hayman reminded me, it’s only a few years since one of their own was congratulated for settling things down to 6%. It was acceptable then. But now…

A debt ratio at 6% of GDP is nothing, of course. To use the traditional analogy, it’s like a household with a combined income of $100,000 taking out a loan of $6000. Quite manageable. Families regularly take out loans of 500% of their GDP to buy their own homes and it’s considered normal, even admirable.

Yes yes, if they spent that money on cocaine instead then might be different, but that’s not the issue here. Anyone who tries to equate stabilising a national economy so people can keep their jobs with a drug habit is in my opinion nothing more than a blind political tribalist. If such comments are made here I shall mock and insult you personally.

This is all part of what my Crikey colleague Bernard Keane calls the Perpetual Present of politics, “in which what happened two days ago, let alone two years ago, is forgotten”. But my preferred term is Hallucinating Goldfish

That must’ve struck a chord, because when I mentioned it last night my comment was retweeted around 30 times. I therefore pointed people to my original post, Post 801: Kill the Hallucinating Goldfish.

I was also reminded that political journalism fails to cover the vast majority of what happens in Parliament and government.

As Tim Dunlop put it, here’s “some stuff you might’ve missed if you relied on the media for all your information.” Like the House passing 29 bills, the Senate 16, and 11 bills passing both houses. Nothing important there, eh?

Quite.

Now my original Hallucinating Goldfish post now seems quite dated, and I haven’t posted anything in the Hallucinating Goldfish category in most than two and a half years. I reckon we need new examples. This is where you come in.

Please help me identify more Hallucinating Goldfish. Where are policies being proposed, or decisions being made, based on a paranoid fantasy worldview and ignoring the lessons of the past?

[Photo: Goldfish by Helga Birna Jónasdóttir, used under a Creative Commons attribution license.]

Today The Age reports that fear of failure is turning away potential citizens in droves.

Some migrants were too frightened to apply to become Australians because they feared they would be deported if they failed the controversial citizenship test, Immigration Minister Chris Evans has admitted…

Just 16,024 migrants applied to be citizens between January and March, compared with 38,850 at the same time last year.

I’ve written about this before, of course, both to point out how the whole concept is teh FAIL (to use current lingo), and how it was just pre-election dog-whistle politics anyway.

It’s pointless. I’m assuming there’s already a black market in the answers — though they’re in the book anyway. As one soon-to-be-citizen told me, “It’s all easy enough: 1. Barton. 2. Bradman. 3. Wattle.” And exactly how does that arcane knowledge prove you’re not a “bad person” in a way that isn’t covered by the police and other checks already in place?

Senator Evans, ruling out scrapping the test but setting up a committee to analyse its impact is just wasting taxpayers’ money. Just make a cup of tea, get yourself an Iced Vo-Vo or two, and work through the logic yourself. If you can, that is.

Labor makes no apologies to those who argue that any regulation of the Internet is like going down the Chinese road. If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor Government is going to disagree.

As usual, Democrat Senator Andrew Bartlett hits the nail on the head, and makes my point for me.

No free speech advocate that I know of advocates such absolute freedom as to defend the provision of child pornography… But the fact it is already illegal shows just how dishonest Conroy’s statement is.

The government’s proposal is not about child pornography at all, which is already seriously illegal online and offline. It is about legal pornography and other ‘inappropriate’ material.

The arguments against this clean-feed idea are simple: it won’t work, and it opens up an unacceptable risk of further government intrusion into our freedom to communicate.

As Senator Bartlett continues:

The catch-all nature of the term ‘inappropriate’ gives me concern. I have little faith that the current government will prove much better than governments everywhere, and be unable to resist the urge to continually increase the scope of what they try to control…

As with every aspect of the measure, until the full details are known its impossible to judge. However, comments like Conroy’s make it much harder to be confident that the government is doing anything other than populist pandering, putting up a feel-good measure which will have no practical impact but create the illusion of doing something effective. Such ineffective actions can even cause harm by lulling parents into a false sense of security, thinking that the internet their kids are accessing at home is effectively filtered when it probably won’t be.

A “clean feed” is impossible. There’s only two ways to identify and block “bad stuff”. Both approaches are used in spam filtering and that’s 100% effective, right? Right.

1. You have a list of where the bad stuff comes from and block those sites. This appears to be the method being proposed. But with new websites going online every minute, and with the ability to “spread the word” in every child’s hands, a list of “bad” sites can’t possibly be kept up to date.
2. You look at the content “live” and try to determine whether it’s good or bad on the fly. However trying to identify “inappropriate” material automatically generates too many false positives. Legitimate material would be blocked by accident. Unacceptable.

In any event, simple tools already exist to circumvent filters like this. They’ll be adapted and available to every Australian child within hours of these filters going live.

The question to ask is “Why is Conroy framing this debate so harshly?”

I doubt it’s because he’s stupid, because so far he’s shown every sign of intelligence. Is it because he’s one of the “union thugs” John Howard warned us about? If so, it’s time for him to learn a more nuanced debating style. But surely he’s been around long enough to learn a bit of subtlety?

I reckon Tim Dunlop has the answer: Stephen Conroy is Labor’s numbers man in the Senate.

The government is ultimately going to have to deal with a Senate that includes the likes of Family First. That party’s Senator Fielding has already commented upon the filtering proposal saying, “Australian families want more [internet protection] and deserve more than they are currently getting, and this is a real test for the Rudd Government.” It is not beyond the realms of possibility that this is all a sop to Family First in order to garner their support in other matters. Real politik, in other words.

With legislation to come first, then trials supposedly happening later this year, that gives plenty of time for Family First to agree to something simpler to implement before the trials turn out (surprise!) to be a failure.

Maybe Senator Conroy is even deliberately making the proposal so outrageous that it will be shot down.

• Website traffic doubled for a couple of days.
• I was blogged about by Tim Dunlop over in Murdochland.
• People from my past emerged from the woodwork — including Keith Conlon, the man who first taught me broadcasting.

Weird coincidences upped the traffic too:

• Interest in Australia’s new ambassador to Italy, Amanda Vanstone, led more than 400 people to read my posting about Boost juice bars.
• 200 people looking for live TV coverage of the space shuttle landing found my post about the previous shuttle touchdown.

But I’m still getting plenty of folks looking for those goddam Steve Irwin jokes , or discovering how to spell Vodafone.