Category: Politics

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Jim Wallace’s pro-censorship lies and distortions

The Australian Christian Lobby’s Jim Wallace is on the Fairfax news sites today, telling the same old lies to support compulsory Internet filtering. Sigh.

Since Wallace promotes himself as a representative of good Christian values, I’ll allow that he may just be ignorant rather than a deliberate liar. Ignorance is no sin: it can be cured with knowledge. But he does use the familiar fraudulent propaganda techniques: misrepresenting his opponents; cherry-picking numbers; failing to explore the implications of those numbers; citing the same suspect Australia Institute report; and wrapping it up in the same old “protect the children” cant.

Those of us who’ve been covering this issue for more than a year now are getting sick of responding to the same easily-rebutted debating tricks. But, as I keep saying, politics is a marathon event. So if Jim’s rolling out the same material, we’ll point out the same flaws.

Again.

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So Conroy’s Internet filter won’t block political speech, eh?

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Another week, another hole appearing in the Rudd government’s plans for pervasive Internet censorship. I’m in Crikey today with a piece headlined So Conroy’s Internet filter won’t block political speech, eh?

It begins:

“Freedom of speech is fundamentally important in a democratic society and there has never been any suggestion that the Australian Government would seek to block political content,” intoned Senator Stephen Conroy on Tuesday.

Yet the very next day, ACMA added a page from what’s arguably a political website to its secret blacklist of Internet nasties.

The page is part of an anti-abortion website which claims to include “everything schools, government, and abortion clinics are afraid to tell or show you”. Yes, photos of dismembered fetuses designed to scare women out of having an abortion. Before you click through, be warned: it is confronting. Here’s the blacklisted page.

The piece goes on to argue that while you may or may not agree with the political stance or tactics of the anti-abortionists, they’re within their rights to express their political views, and express them strongly. The article isn’t behind the paywall, so read on…

The article also quotes Peter Black, who lectures in Internet law at QUT and blogs at Freedom to Differ. The full text of his commentary is over the jump.

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Conroy’s speech to ALIA Information Online 2009

Information Online 2009 logo

Senator Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, opened the Information Online 2009 conference this morning. Here’s the full text of his speech.

You can also grab the PDF file, should you want to print it neatly on paper. (Why?)

Personally, I was surprised at how defensive Conroy sounded about the Internet filter — his Rabbit-Proof Firewall, as I call it. I mentioned this in the live blog. But then again, librarians are supporters of open, non-judgemental access to information for all. Perhaps he perceived them as a hostile audience. And he would have been conscious that this was his first speaking engagement for 2009.

Here, then, the full text, as provided by the Minister’s office…

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Live Blog: ALIA Information Online 2009, Day 1

Information Online 2009 logo

Senator Stephen Conroy is apparently opening today’s proceedings of Information Online 2009, a 3-day conference in Sydney organise by the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA). I’ll be live blogging some of the proceedings here.

I’ll start my live blog at about 9am Sydney time — in just under two and a half hours — on this page. See you then!

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Telstra holds back broadband speeds. Again. (Revisited)

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[This story was originally written for Crikey, where it was published on 12 January 2009. I’ve linked to it previously Here it is in full, along with a wonderful follow-up comment from a Telstra PR guy and my extremely snarky reply.]

Confused by Telstra’s rejected low-cal bid for the National Broadband Network? Let’s stir some new jargon into the stew: “DOCSIS 3” and “dark fibre”. Suddenly Telstra’s strategy makes sense — for Telstra — but it delays the rollout of high-speed broadband even further. Again.

DOCSIS 3 is a new system for cable internet which increases speeds from the current 17Mbit per second of BigPond Cable (30Mbit in Sydney and Melbourne) to 100Mbit or more. Last week Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo revealed that the technology is being deployed, but implied that it won’t be offered until they’re forced to by a competitor’s actions.

“We have [DOCSIS 3] as an option if somebody chooses to compete and to compete with us,” he told a conference in Phoenix.

“The only difference is we’ll be there a lot quicker a lot faster a lot bigger, a lot more integrated and with more capabilities than anybody else.”

How does Telstra do it quicker? By quietly stashing away its secret weapons, ready to be unleashed when a competitor tried to deploy their own big guns. Remember how Telstra didn’t sell ADSL2+ broadband, even from exchanges where equipment was already installed, until ISPs like iiNet started selling their own ADSL2+?

This time Telstra will do it quicker by using dark fibre — optical fibre cable that’s already in the ground but not yet “lit up” by the data-carrying laser beams.

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