Journalists tend to adopt a natural default position whereby censorship is deemed to be one of the purest forms of evil, and that we should fight any government which tries to curtail the freedom of adults to make up their own minds on what they say, watch and read.
Over the past few months I’ve found that my personal default position has been challenged, oddly enough, by the anti-censorship lobby. Lobby is a bit of a loose term - there is no formal lobby as such - it’s a pretty diverse and disorganised conglomeration of humanity, containing authors, artists, journalists, information technology experts, social media enthusiasts, twitterers and the like.
Large - and in my view, largely stupid - sections of this group have had the surprise effect of turning me into a closet fan of Communications Minister Stephen Conroy. Not because his internet filtering plan is a work of genius. Far from it.
It is worrying that we are adopting a mandatory system when other European democracies have opted for a voluntary one, where internet service providers can decide whether to use the government-operated nanny system to prevent access to dodgy sites.
It’s even more alarming that the system will (obviously) involve automation - and as anyone who has a firewall at their workplace knows, these systems are notoriously unreliable, often preventing access to innocuous material while failing to block actual smut.
As the leaked “blacklist” of banned sites revealed earlier this year, even thought it was only a working draft, some innocent arty sites and some credible journalism about scandals such as the Bill Henson affair had been caught up in the initial version of this system.
But for all these serious flaws and complicated questions, the anti-censor brigade has in my view turned Stephen Conroy into something of a hero for decency and civility. This is because the arguments being mounted against his plan - and specifically against him, as for some unfathomable reason this has become a bitchy personal campaign - fall into three woeful categories.
The historically inaccurate, the deliberately incorrect, and the morally ambivalent.
If you want to get a close look a generation of pampered kids which has never known repression, and knows little of history, open a twitter account and type in the words #cleanfeed.
Earlier this year they were taping their mouths up with black duct tape in protest at what they saw as a blanket attack on their web freedoms. Now they are redoing their avatars (computer headshots) to run “No Clean Feed” under their faces as they casually compare the conduct of the Rudd Government to the dictatorships in China, Iran, Burma, the former Soviet Bloc. It’s like they’re getting off on the idea that this is their Tianenmen moment, the small difference being that at no stage will a tank come crashing through the study that Mum and Dad built at their eastern suburbs bungalow when they did the renovations back in 2006, just as young Hamish was starting his communications degree.
These ahistorical misrepresentations have found a voice beyond the twitter crowd and have been egged on, recklessly, by members of the Coalition, jurists such as Michael Kirby, publishers who should really know more about history than to make such a dumb comparison. It’s not only an absurd distortion of government intent, it’s a rotten insult to those who have actually been tortured and killed in those countries for trying to exercise their freedom of speech.
The thing that helps steer these censorship campaigners towards historical inaccuracy - aside from their strange fantasies of political persecution in their otherwise drab bourgeois existence - is the outright lies that are being told about how the system will work.
It’s been said repeatedly that the government will be able to draw up its own list and declare on a whim that a particular website or site must be shut down. This has of course been extrapolated out into any number of worse case scenarios, along the absurdist lines seen with biker gangs or terrorist groups. You know the logic - “If the government can ban the Hells Angels or Al Qaeda, what’s to stop them banning the local Rotary Club?” (apart from of course common sense, constitutionally guaranteed elections, and the small fact that the Rotary Club doesn’t sell speed and didn’t claim responsibility for September 11.)
From everything I have read by people who have actually looked at the proposals, the government will itself have no power to ban any website. Rather, the decisions of the independent classifications board - which already determine which movies, books and magazines we consume - will be extended to include the same content online.
And it’s squalid stuff - and only squalid stuff - that is being talked about. Child porn, bestiality, rape fantasies, women being beaten up - the sort of stuff which you’d think any self-respecting left-winger should be actively campaigning against.
Despite the hideous nature of what is being targeted, it is depressingly easy to find an absolutist anti-censorship mindset out there. It enjoyed one of its best expressions earlier this year on Q and A, on a night when despite that program’s (genuine) attempts to achieve an ideologically diverse audience, the crowd appeared to be evenly split between communists under the age of 25, and communists over the age of 65.
Stephen Conroy was perched on the stage with the black hat, with conservative columnist Andrew Bolt playing a dastardly support role. And it was Bolt who, to his credit, took fellow panellist Louise Adler from Melbourne University Press to task over her quite stunning declaration that pretty much anything should be published and we could then battle it out in the contest of ideas.
“What I find reprehensible, you don’t,” Adler said to Bolt. “What you find unpalatable, I don’t. I want to fight you in the public sphere.”
Bolt challenged Adler as to where - or whether - she would ever draw a line.
“So nothing at all should be banned?” he asked.
“May a thousand ideas bloom and let’s contest them, because that’s what tells us that our democracy is robust,” she replied.
Tellingly, host Tony Jones got a huge and unsolicited cheer from the audience when he asked Conroy hypothetically if there was anything in the legislation that could prevent Andrew Bolt’s column from being published.
The crowd gave the game away there. They did it again on our website The Punch this week, where we ran a thoughtful piece by journalist Alexandra Carlton suggesting that the need to eliminate child porn was more important than blanket net freedom - only to face attack from anti-censorship campaigners for having the temerity to publish something they disagreed with.
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