On last nights ABC program Q&A communications minister Stephen Conroy faced the music over his governments plans to sensor & filter the Australian internet.
His appearance created the biggest reaction from the Australian public ever seen on the show.
Watch this 47 second video of the introduction by host Tony Jones to see what I mean.
Senator Conroy bumbles, fumbles and squirms his way through 30 minutes of grilling on the program.
Not only was the program compelling viewing it was a tremendous example of a free and open democratic society at work. Exactly what Senator Conroy is threatening with this legislation. Australia will be the only democracy in the world with compulsory filtering of the internet if Senator Conroy gets his way.
Over the last couple of day’s we have been watching the ultimate in ’social engineering’ played out. We have had the ‘thought police’, the ‘tree police’ and now we have the ‘pleasure police’ campaigning for a ‘fat tax’. Their aim is to tax such foods as iconic Vegemite right of supermarket shelves.
The Rudd Government’s National Preventative Health Taskforce, for example, which is due to report in June, is canvassing regulating fat, salt and sugar content, banning advertising of unhealthy products to children and slugging “energy-dense foods” with a “fat tax”.
Does this Australian Labor socialist government know no bounds in trying to control what Australians see, think, do and now eat?
I have to tell you that I’m getting very ‘fed up’ with this ongoing and unwanted government intrusion into every aspect of my life.
This time it’s childhood obesity that the government is supposedly waging war on. Apparently Australian parents are just so stupid that they don’t know how or what to feed their children, so the government must step in.
It would make a lot more sense to spend money on healthy living and eating education program to deal with those who are so socially unaware that the way they feed their children causes obesity in about 6% of Australian children. Even though that figure has remained static for a decade.
But much better to raise taxes to achieve the same outcomes. Thats the way the socialist do things.
It seems assured that the taxers and banners will play the populist card and say advertisers who target children and supermarkets who display chocolate at checkouts should be blamed for obesity.
But while it is easier to police people’s lives through the tax system, or by regulating what is in the breakfast their children eat while watching ad-free morning TV, the more the nanny state does the less people will pay attention.
Carbon Tax to curb our lifestyle excesses, luxury car tax to control what we drive, fat tax to control what we eat, internet filtering to control the net, I’ve getting very unhappy about this agenda of ’social engineering‘ that wants to force me to live my life according to a government template.
Australian society is getting a distinctly Orwellian feel about it under the Rudd Government.
Dr Peter Brain [pictured] , of forecasting group National Economics, said Australia’s international position on broadband was “just criminal”.
“Something urgent has to be done about broadband very quickly,” Dr Brain told reporters at the launch.
“It’s costing rural and regional Australia considerably in employment and this is where we most need it.”
Once again the result of years of indifference and neglect by federal governments both Coalition and Labor is seeing rural and regional Australia being left behind in the new digital economy.
The current Federal Labor is more focused on introducing mandatory internet filtering which will slow down the internet by up to 75% than providing broadband access to rural & regional Australia.
As far as most of our Federal Politicans are concerned if you don’t live in a city, you don’t count. Thats no sensationalizing it – its just a fact. When will this outrageous neglect of rural & regional Australia ever end?
Australian Local Government Association (ALGA) president Councillor Geoff Lake [pictured] said local communities were crying out to be connected to the information super highway.
“We see the lack of the establishment of a national broadband network being one of the biggest failure of the Howard government.”
This is hysteria akin to the witch hunts of the dark ages. When I read this I though it must be happening in communist China not 60 kms down the coast from me.
Sixty year old Queensland man Chris Illingworth from Maroochydore has been, arrested, interrogated for seven hours without a lawyer and now faces three charges. He has had to post $10,000 bail, has to report to the police station every two days and has had travel restrictions placed on him.
Obviously Illingworth is a dangerous criminal. Here is what the 60 year old father of 4 did.
The video had already been widely distributed across the internet after being posted on You Tube. In fact US TV networks had run parts of the video as news items. The video was made in Russia. Millions of people have seen the video on Commercial TV in the USA and on the Video sharing sites Liveleak & YouTube.
Chris Illingworth, 60, a father of four from Maroochydore, thought he would share it with fellow users of Liveleak, a site similar to YouTube but focused on news and current events. In two years, he has uploaded hundreds of videos to Liveleak.
Here is a still of the Video to give you the idea of the setting -- a young man (father?) in his home playing with (his) child. Also Chris Illingworth. Photo from the Sydney Morning Herald.
Chris posted this video on liveleak to share with others just as I have shared hundreds of videos with our members on Agmates. This is what happens when the thought police run rampant in our society.
His home was raided on Sunday, November 30, by Queensland Police from Task Force Argos, which specialises in combating child po**ography and child gr**mers.
Illingworth said his life changed the moment two officers -- a detective chief inspector and a detective chief constable -- banged on his door and demanded they search his house.
“I went to turn on the laptop and they got stinking mad, as if I was trying to delete something I guess, and I was just trying to be helpful,” he said.
The officers plugged a small black box into his computer and proceeded for an hour and a half to analyse the contents of his hard drive in a search for child po**ography.
Illingworth said the officers insisted on visiting his office at a mechanic workshop to examine his computer there. They found nothing, Illingworth said.
Before being taken to the police station, Illingworth was allowed to make one call, which he used to phone the owner of Liveleak in Britain to ask that the video be removed.
At Maroochydore police station, Illingworth was interviewed without a lawyer. He was forced to provide fingerprints, a DNA sample and a mug-shot photograph.
“They wouldn’t let me go to the toilet without them coming with me -- I couldn’t go anywhere without someone following me,” he said.
The officers explained to Illingworth that they traced him using his IP address after someone in Britain reported the video clip to police. Interpol had found the clip was originally uploaded to a Russian website.
The police found no child po**ography. The three charges all relate to the video -- They are 1. Accessing Child Ab*se material. 2. Downloading Child Ab*se material, Uploading Child Ab*se material with intent to distribute. Illingworth is an innocent man being treated like a ped**hile.
Illingworth life has been ruined by these over zealous thought police. What are they going to do now, go to the USA and arrest all of the TV executives and presenters who ran the clip on their news sites?
What about arresting and charging the owners of Liveleak in the UK. How about going to Russia and arresting the family who made the home video. What about applying to YouTube to find the 1,000’s of people who have watched the video.
“It’s going to ruin my f—ing life and everything. I’m 60 years old and what did I do wrong?” Illingworth said.
“I didn’t make it, I didn’t play with a baby, I just uploaded it [the video clip]. It’s nothing sex*al or anything else -- just a smiling baby.”
I’ve seen the video, and it is just looks like a dad swinging his baby about, they both look to be having fun, although the swinging is a little wild, the baby is happy and smiling at the end. It just looks like an ordinary family home video.
There is no way I would consider it to have been abusive, at worst the man may have been a little irresponsible. He would not be the first parent I’ve seen get a bit carried away playing with a baby.
It is certainly no worse that Steve Irwin feeding the crocodiles at Australia Zoo with baby Bob tucked under one arm or Michael Jackson holding his baby out over a balcony.
The founder of Liveleak in Britian Hayden Hewitt is outraged at the attack on Illingworth. He has made a video appealing for international support for Illingworth. Watch The Video here. (Don’t worry I’ll never give you a link to or post a video that will get you raided and arrested by the thought police).
Here’s the Hayden Hewitt video off YouTube.
Colin Jacobs, vice-chairman of the online users’ rights lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said public anxiety around the depiction of children seemed to have spiked in recent times, fueled by politicians and anti-child-abuse campaigners.
“It’s now reached the point where any parent would have to think twice about posting a photo of their children to a photo-sharing website,” he said.
“Cases like this seem to indicate that we’ve gone beyond the point of the sensible and entered into hysteria territory.”
Do we live in Australia or is it now Communist China ? The Australian Government wants to impose mandatory filtering of the internet that will put us on the same footing with China and Iran for censorship. Why -- when a innocent grandfather can be arrested by QLD police with the assistance of the UK police and Interpol?
Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia of the internet. With over 2.6 million pages all entered and maintained by internet users across the world.
Wikipedia has been blacklisted by a British online child po**ography watchdog, causing almost every internet user in Britain to be blocked from contributing to the site anonymously.
The British Government-backed Internet Watch Foundation blacklisted Wikipedia over an article on the 1976 album Virgin Killer by German heavy metal band Scorpions.
At issue was a screen shot of the album cover, published with the article, that featured a naked, young girl with her genitals obscured by a simulated tear in the photograph.
The whole of the site, all 2.6 million pages has been blocked to UK user because of this one image. The site has been blocked because of a complaint by ONE user. This is the type of Nanny State that Australia is headed for with it’s mandatory internet filtering.
Sarah Robertson, spokeswoman for the Internet Watch Foundation, told the Associated Press that the picture was flagged by an internet user late last week. The foundation concluded, after consulting British police, that the picture could break child abuse laws.
Wikipedia refuses to remove the image.
“We have no reason to believe the article, or the image contained in the article, has been held to be illegal in any jurisdiction anywhere in the world,” said the Wikimedia Foundation’s general counsel, Mike Godwin.
“We believe it’s worth noting that the image is currently visible on Amazon, where the album can be freely purchased by UK residents. It is available on thousands of websites that are accessible to the UK public.”
AUSTRALIA, 2014: President Rudd yesterday extended the Federal Government’s list of banned internet sites to include any material relating to takeaway food.
“After constructive ongoing dialogue with a diverse range of experts in the relevant medical disciplines, we have taken this pro-active egulatory initiative in the interests of the health of all working families,” he said. The “junk food filter”, as Mr Rudd described it, follows last year’s decision to block access to sites promoting the consumption of alcohol or providing information on illegal home-brewing.
Here they come again – the do-gooder social engineers who give honest hard-working nannies a bad name.
Courtesy of Prime Minister kevin Rudd and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy. Coming to your home computer soon.
With mandatory internet filtering Kevin Rudd & Stephen Conroy will decide what information you can access on the internet. Issues like Global Warming, The Murray Darling Water Buyback, The Northern Territory Intervention, The War in Iraq, or anything critical of the Australian Labor party could be blocked.
Kevin Rudd’s Australian Labor Government wants to impose the same internet censorship that exists in countries like China & Iran.
Those of you who use Wikipedia know what a great free resource it is. Here Jimmy Wales the founder talks about internet censorship. Wikipedia is a banned site in China.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Communications minister Stephen Conroy should abandon this transparent attempt to trample on Australians rights to free speech.
The Australian Labor Governments plan to put in place totalitarian style internet censorship is not welcome by Australian citizens.
Support for the Government’s plan to censor the internet has hit rock bottom, with even some children’s welfare groups now saying that that the mandatory filters, aimed squarely at protecting kids, are ineffective and a waste of money.
The largest independent child rights group in the world has come out strongly against Labours plans.
Holly Doel-Mackaway, adviser with Save the Children, the largest independent children’s rights agency in the world, said educating kids and parents was the way to empower young people to be safe internet users.
She said the filter scheme was “fundamentally flawed” because it failed to tackle the problem at the source and would inadvertently block legitimate resources.
Furthermore there was no evidence to suggest that children were stumbling across child pornography when browsing the web.
The federal government and Minister Stephen Conroy now should just accept that Australians will not tolerate their Communist State attempts to censor Australia’s internet.
The numbers of organizations and politicians lining up against Labors plans to control the internet are growing daily.
Live trials of the filters …. are slated to begin by Christmas, despite harsh opposition from the Greens, Opposition, the internet industry, consumers and online rights groups.
Australians largest online advocacy grow GetUp has an online petition (which I’ve signed) that has already attracted 55,000 signatures.
Our campaign to ‘Save the Net’ is gaining momentum faster than all expectations, as the Government’s ill-considered plans to slow down and censor the internet is “facing a major backlash”
More than 55,000 fellow Australians have already signed the petition to Communications Minister Senator Conroy. His plan has even been slammed by children’s welfare groups, who say the filter is “fundamentally flawed” and simply will not work.
Without an immense reaction from the community, the Government will claim they have the green light to begin limiting our freedoms – and who knows where that slippery slope will end? Already euthanasia, gambling, anorexia and legal adult content are being discussed.
Be part of the solution by letting your friends know about this campaign, and ask them to join you, children’s welfare groups, internet providers, consumers, engineers, network administrators, and 55,000 everyday Australians in defense of our freedom and in defence of our internet:
Help build a movement today in defence of our rights, to prevent Australia joining Iran, China, Saudi Arabia and Burma in an undemocratic club of governments who view the internet as a threat.
Hit the streets on Saturday 13th December in nationwide protests against this internet censorship.
Meet the man behind the Labor Governments push to introduce mandatory Internet Filtering in Australia.
Clive Hamilton is the face of the ‘intellectual left’ in Australia and has been advocating since 2003 for a mandatory filtering (read censorship) of the internet.
Hamilton claims the moral high ground of protecting our children against po***ography, even though he knows that it will not work. An article written by Hamilton on the 19th of November on the issue is very revealing:
“The internet has spawned a community of devotees who operate in a cow-boy culture that thinks itself beyond the normal reach of social control, as if they inhabit an independent cyber-nation that applies it own laws in the form of voluntary protocols for those who choose to accept them.”
Note the term ’social control’. Even though the majority of Australians don’t realize it over the past 2 decades Clive Hamilton through his leftist intellectual think tanks The Australia Institute & The Climate Institute have had a not inconsequential impact on Australian society.
Hamilton and the intellectual left have focused on 2 modes of operation: ‘social engineering’ brought about by ’social control’.
Social Engineering:
Clive Hamilton through his left winged Think Tanks, The Australia Institute and The Climate Institute have spent an enormous amount of time developing ‘leftist social engineering’ manifestos.
As a left winged intellectual Hamilton and his think tanks have had (still do) unfettered and open access to ministers in State & Federal Labor governments to influence and indeed initiate policy decisions. That’s the purpose of the think tanks after all.
Social Control: (this is where the internet is a real thorn in Hamiltons side)
Before the widespread uptake of the internet in Australia, when those policies were released by the respective minister, the Australian Mainstream Media, particularly the ABC would turn to and quote Clive Hamilton as an independent commentator on the issue.
The Australian public was unaware that Hamilton in many cases was the back room left winged intellectual who had inspired the policy in the first place.
There are many examples of this, but there is none better than the current Labor policy of mandatory filtering the internet to rid it of ‘unwanted material’. To explain Hamilton’s role in the policy read Syd Walkers excellent article:
The internet has empowered ordinary Australians to find their own information from 1,000’s of different sources inside and outside of Australia. For example, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s recent attempts to imply in the mainstream media that countries such as New Zealand, the UK, Scandinavia have mandatory internet filtering is debunked by a simple google search.
Australians no longer can be controlled by manipulation of a handful of Multi-National Media outlets. This really bothers Hamilton. He see’s that he is losing his ’social control’ which is essential to bring about ’social engineering’.
As further evidence of this another recent article by Hamilton on Crikey (sorry no link, subscribers only) railing against criticism of IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pauchauri and my comment is instructive.
14th November 2008
“In the days before independent online media like Agmates, Left winged academics like Hamilton were quoted virtually unchallenged by the mainstream media. He’s clearly upset that those times have changed.
“Duffy’s article recycled uncritically the latest piece of denialist clap-trap circulating on the internet and occasionally breaking in to the serious press.
Although the real scientists soon point out the error the clap-trap continues to circulate, confusing the public and giving the impression that scientists cannot makes up their minds.”
What’s the world coming to Clive? Oh for the good old days when only Clive’s side of the story made it into the ’serious press’.
Clive has been the darling of the left winged mainstream media for many years with his anti-capitalism and anti-religious views.
END.
Make no bones about it – Clive Hamilton and Labors mandatory internet filtering is designed to win back ’social control’from the internet. Everything else he has quoted as his reason for promoting the concept is a smoke screen.
Just ask your children if you want an example of the power the government will have to control what Australians can view on the internet when they introduce mandatory filtering.
The Queensland education system filters access to it’s school computers. At a glance you’d say fair enough.
One of Agmates readers has asked her children what they thought of mandatory filtering. Her 12 year old son unprompted told her that his class was doing an assignment on Global warming.
On the school computer system he typed in the term ‘Global Warming Untruths’ and was blocked by the filter.
When he asked the teacher why, the response was – ‘Oh there is so much conflicting information on the net about it – we (the School system) just does not want to confuse you.’
A 16 year old year 11 student typed in the word ‘Buddhism’ into the school computer and was blocked by the filter. The answer as to why the term ‘Buddhism‘ a religion practiced by an estimated half a billion people throughout the world was blocked, the student was told that the Queensland school system associated it with the occult and therefore it was banned.
This is the same power that the Federal government will have with mandatory internet filtering. Is this what you really want, some nameless, faceless government bureaucrat deciding what is appropriate for Australians to see and whats not. That’s exactly what happens in the only other countries in the world that have mandatory internet filtering – China, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia. Not 1 democracy.
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy scoffs at suggestions the government would ever do this.
As I pointed out in a previous article, there is nothing to stop them doing it once the legislation is enacted. Australians have no constitution and hence legal rights to ‘freedom of speech’.
There is not a court in Australia that could stop the government blocking any content they decide is ‘unwanted‘ , say blocking any critsim of the Labor Party for example.
This is an incredibly dangerous piece of legislation and must be stopped. Please write to your local member and the Communications Minister and tell him you oppose the introduction of mandatory internet filtering.
Does this Australian Labor socialist government know no bounds in trying to control what Australians see, think, do and now eat?
Wikipedia 
Support for the Government’s 
Australians largest online advocacy grow GetUp has an online petition (which I’ve signed) that has already attracted 55,000 signatures.
