Censorship

Simon Katich doesn’t deserve a reprimand. He deserves an award for restraint.

After falling foul of the thought police at Cricket Australia he was called up before that stuffy little outfit’s resident kangaroo court to explain his so-called “spray” against Michael Clarke. “Spray”, as it was dubbed in headlines, is a ludicrously overstated term for what Katich had said. All he said was that he doubted he would ever get a spot in the Test team under captain and selector Michael Clarke.

Katich, you will recall, grabbed Clarke by the neck in a dressing room dust-up in 2009, risking serious damage to Clarke’s latest haircut. His assessment of his chances of reclaiming a baggy green under Clarke was both accurate and unremarkable.

Continue reading "Simon Katich and the year of living silently" »

What happened?
With the strange exception of the Walkley Award judges, many people and media organisations revised their assessment of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange over the past 12 months.

Assange shot to prominence last year with the explosive release of secret government documents from around the world, many of which revealed stories which were wholly in the public interest. They ranged from high level diplomatic assessments of foreign governments, to the more titillating but fascinating snippets of info which shed light on the personalities of world leaders. In the domestic setting we learned some interesting facts about our own government.

We learned that, as Prime Minister, the Mandarin-speaking Kevin Rudd was of the view that Australia and its chief ally the US should prepare for the possibility of a war against China.

Continue reading "Biggest moments of 2011 #15 Publish and be damned" »

Today’s news that an Iranian actor faces a year’s jail and 90 lashes for starring in a South Australia-funded film is an affront to justice, artistic license and about 100 other things. It is, however, very good news for a certain K Rudd.

The man who was Prime Minister until he walked backwards into a very long scimitar has had a good week. Not since he confronted a jaded John Howard and his despised WorkChoices at the 2007 election has Rudd been presented with such a string of scenarios tailor-made for his popularity.

If politics is normally the equivalent of facing missiles hurled at 100 miles an hour, this week has been T-Ball for Rudd. First, he out-manouevred Gillard with the Kuta Kid, owning the news cycle and making Gillard’s phone call to the boy’s cell look like a desperate grab for attention. Now he’s got the chance to go into bat for Iranian actor Marzieh Vafamehr.

Continue reading "This must be a job for SuperKevin…" »

If you want to gain an insight into the often distressingly abusive world of online political discussion, type the name Sophie Mirabella into Twitter or Google, and sit back and marvel at the stuff that has been written in the past 48 hours.

Mirabella is the Liberal member for the federal seat of Indi. The archly conservative Mirabella is one of those commendable politicians who leads with her chin. She has been a regular contributor to the The Punch, since its launch just over two years ago, and has never once complained about any of the often violently critical reader comments we publish under her pieces. She will go on programs such as Q and A knowing that the left-leaning Twitterati will be salivating in their share houses as they log in and saddle up to smash her to pieces, before she even opens her mouth.

Mirabella has been in the press this past two days over the revelation of a brewing court battle involving the death of a man forty years her senior with whom she had a relationship.

Continue reading "In cyberspace everyone can hear you scream" »

You can call a controversial comic’s work an ‘artwork’. But this doesn’t change its shocking subject matter.

American cartoonist Robert Crumb has repeatedly depicted scenes of rape, incest, paedophilia and bestiality. Many of his works have racist overtones. We should be discouraging him from publishing, and I was relieved to hear yesterday that he had cancelled his Australian tour.

Robert Crumb is a self confessed “weirdo“, whose work promotes exploitation of women and minors. We should not be celebrating him.

Continue reading "Crummy artist left to pick up the scraps" »

Of the many challenging aspects of parenting, one of the greatest is the pressure to restrict or ban your kids from watching or listening to entertainers who push the boundaries of decency. The seamier parts of popular culture are so pervasive that it often seems impossible to shield your children from what the classification people like to call “adult concepts”.

Consider the program Masterchef. It’s terrific family entertainment - fun, civilised, educational. Masterchef has Katy Perry’s “Hot and Cold” as its theme song. After watching it a few times the kids love this catchy tune and ask you to download it from iTunes. Next thing you know you’re playing it in the car and your five-year-old son is singing along with the offensively incomprehensible line “And you PMS like a bitch that I know.” Terrific stuff.

Should you step in and play the censor, you risk drawing their attention to something they either don’t understand, or hadn’t even noticed anyway. And if you go fully down the path of banning them from a certain performer, you also risk turning that person into such a mysteriously illicit figure that your kids are much more interested in them than they were in the first place.

Continue reading "Miley Madness and society’s irreversible moral decline" »

You may be surprised to learn that I’m in favour of an internet filter.

I know what you’re thinking. I’m a pretty wild kind of guy - I don’t always tuck my shirt in, cross one-way streets without looking both ways and occasionally don’t bother pre-heating the oven.

But despite my roguish charm, frequent viewings of Black Hawk Down and awkward attempts at skateboarding, I just can’t bring myself to support internet freedoms.

Continue reading "The bad stuff on the internet must be blocked" »

The Palace is not amused. A royal edict, delivered not by chariot with unfurled parchment, but via grey-suits and sneaky lawyer speak, has decreed there shall be no Chaser royal wedding coverage. Oh, well. No big loss.

Let’s face it, you were either going to salivate over every second of the straight Royal Wedding coverage, or you were going to act like someone with a life and ignore it completely. The Chaser’s coverage, despite this week’s massive publicity blitz, was always going to be of minimal interest to the masses.

That’s not to say The Chaser’s take wouldn’t have been a laugh. Without doubt, it would have been an amusing enough diversion from the obsessive fussing over the length of the bride’s train, Beckham’s wedding hairdo and other minutiae. But there’s no way it would’ve been must-see TV, and there’s a very simple reason why.

Continue reading "Aborted Chaser coverage is no great loss" »

About 10 years ago in southern California a young fellow by the name of Ryan McPherson hit upon the idea of bribing homeless people with bottles of bourbon to fight each other, and to film the ensuing brawls for a series of movies entitled Bum Fights. The movies, four of which were made, were hailed as just the latest example of a sick society in irreversible decline.

Homeless groups said the movies encouraged violence against people living on the streets, as well as dehumanising and mocking them. Amid threats of legal action, the producers agreed to stop making the films, and were forced to pay compensation to some of the homeless men involved.

The idea of filming a staged fight between the homeless as a form of entertainment would be regarded by a normal person as offensive to dignity and decency. In Australia this week we’ve learned that a depressing number of people – tens of thousands of them in fact – will have a hearty chuckle watching a couple of kids laying into each other in the schoolyard.

Continue reading "A dumb, webbed-up nation cheers on the fat kid" »

I’m glad that the rejection of a photograph donated to a charity auction for the Sydney Children’s Hospital raises the spectre of morality in our society. Because it’s the perfect instance of why we need to take a serious look at ourselves and the values we want to promote.

Del Katherine Barton, one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists and someone well known both for her love of family and her charitable work for childrens’ causes, submitted a photograph of her shirtless six year-old son to be auctioned for the hospital’s benefit.

The board of the hospital has rejected the work on the basis that it doesn’t comply with their “strict rules on images of children”. 

Continue reading "More hysteria over the ‘sexualisation’ of children" »

Besides liking to get their picture in the newspaper, the politicians of the world have something in common: They are struggling with the internet.

Not just how to set up wireless on their laptops, or how to clear incriminating sites from their browser histories, but how to regulate information itself.

In almost every country on earth, the free access to the world’s data is causing embarrassment, consternation and even panic. And the lawmakers are reacting.

Continue reading "Politicians struggling to cope with that interwebby thing" »

Well, it was years in the making.

It has taken countless meetings, public submissions, reports, and years of debate, but on the incredibly long-overdue introduction of an R18+ category into the national classification system for video games, the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General (SCAG, to you and me) has finally decided to take action…

… and they’ve decided to wait a little longer to make a decision.

Continue reading "You’ve got to harden up, gamers of Australia" »

Over the past 20 years there’s been a revolution in how people use technology in their spare time. I grew up in a time where most people had a TV and a stereo in their house and from the 1980s, VCRs. That was pretty much it.

Fast forward to 2010, and many households have flat screen TVs, iPods, PlayStations and a plethora of other computing devices. In fact, 88% of Australian households now have a gaming console.  Kids and adults alike wile away the hours pretending to play for St Kilda, playing guitar like Ray Toro or fighting guerrilla wars.

It’s our job as a society, and my job as the Minister responsible for classification in the Australian Government, to work out which games should be allowed to be played by anyone; which games should be restricted to adults; and which are so extreme and offensive, that we wouldn’t want them here at all.

Continue reading "Why the government backs an R18+ games rating" »

I was reading Stuart McDowell’s fun-loving article about murder and I found myself feeling a strange a sense of deja-vu.

About two years ago, when I first started at studying at Art School, there were two causes that I believed in with particularly more fervour than others. One was that heavy metal was roughly equivalent in value to pure Ambrosia, and that anyone who couldn’t be converted was a dullard, a dunce and a malevolent slime. The other was that fighting against the censorship of video games, and in particular the bloodiest, most violent ones, was a cause that any sane person should feel the most passionate zeal for, and if they didn’t, then they should feel the deepest, burning shame.

I suppose that’s fairly indicative of what I was like as an 18 year old. My hair was a silky black mane of heavy metal pride, to perfectly match the sleeveless flannel shirts, camouflage shorts and combat boots in which I was permanently outfitted. And I absolutely loved video games. And looking back, I was a pretty tasteless, and for want of a better word, boring kid.

Continue reading "The coolest video games don’t need to be censored" »

Conservatives regard him as a treasonous anarchist who is jeopardising the security of the free world and imperilling the lives of soldiers and diplomats. Progressives hail him as a hero for his determination to ensure the unfettered release of any and every bit of political information which comes his way, by publishing cables which shed light on the conduct of wars, reveal the secret assessments of the foreign service and expose the character flaws of world leaders.

He is Julian Assange, the Queensland-born founder of Wikileaks, the renegade website which has spooked the world’s spooks and sent a shudder through government spines from Washington to Westminster, and beyond, by indiscriminately releasing thousands of diplomatic cables via the internet.

A warrant is out for his arrest, Interpol want to sit him down and shut him down, but Assange is undeterred. He is promising that his next step will be to target corporate America with a dump of internal documents which could bring down one of the biggest banks in the United States. He has also apparently obtained and is sitting on some 1500 cables relating to Australia. Who only knows what they could reveal.

Continue reading "Killer content: should the media follow every Wikileak?" »

Earlier this year a mate and I drove 300km across North Carolina to have a pork sandwich. The town of Lexington is the capital of what our American friends call “barbecue” –slow-cooked, shredded pork shoulder served with a vinegary chilli sauce and coleslaw. You can feel your heart slowing down as you eat it and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Heading west from Lexington, towards the hillbilly heartland of the Appalachian Mountains, we saw a huge billboard on the side of one of the backroads.

It said: “You are now entering Klan Country” and bore the swastika-inspired logo of the Ku Klux Klan and a huge Confederate Flag.

Continue reading "Freedom of speech extends to the vulgar, vacuous and vile" »

For about the fifty-millionth time on my television screen in recent times, I recently witnessed yet another slimy current affairs story that shouldn’t have been screened at 6.35 pm.

This time it was the tale of a woman who is taking her former boss to the cleaners for sexual harassment.  In itself, the story on Today Tonight didn’t particularly offend my sensibilities; it was quite newsworthy and, if told sensitively, may not have aroused my ire.  But it’s the sleazy manner in which these stories are so often portrayed that really gets up my nose.

Why did they have to give the intimate details of the case – word for word?  Why did they have to quote the man who supposedly said to the young woman during dinner that the dessert was so good it was ‘like a **** in the mouth’?  Oh yes, they beeped out the ‘offensive’ word.  Woohoo!  Good on them for being so ‘family friendly’. 

Continue reading "Yes Today Tonight, your sleaziness has my attention" »

Few have succeeded in defending the seemingly indefensible; O.J Simpson’s attorney being a notable exception. Yet I will attempt to make a defence for Wendy Francis, Queensland’s much maligned Senate candidate for Family First.

At the outset – a disclosure. Francis has used my PR company in the past for strategic advice (don’t laugh – I already know what you are thinking) and I assisted her from a media perspective in her campaign to “make the outdoors G-rated” a few months back.

That said, this article is not being written for her, nor does she have any knowledge of it. I am merely adding my perspective to bring some sense of balance and understanding to what has been an extremely one-sided, and in some ways unfair, reaction.

Continue reading "Gay marriage row: in defence of Wendy Francis" »

‘Vox pops’ are among the staples of daily journalism. Little snippets of public opinion, they don’t prove anything about the way people are thinking, but they can give a flavour. Sometimes they reveal how little the public know about a subject that’s been grabbing the headlines, sometimes their vehemence reveals unsuspected levels of bitterness or anger.

But ask any TV or radio journalist, and you’ll find that vox pops are in some ways harder to get than they used to be. It’s not because the public are less willing to talk – quite the reverse.

Back in the seventies, almost everyone would hurry past the proffered microphone: nowadays people are much more media-friendly. No, the problem nowadays is often where to ask your questions – because we, as a nation, have allowed so much of our public space to be privatised.

Continue reading "Freedom’s just another word" »

There’s a tendency in some circles to see disclosures like the Wikileaks publishing of 90,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan as an inherently good thing.

Many people – from all parts of the political spectrum – see the release of secret government information as desirable as a rule because it allows people to look into the inner workings of the state apparatus and its agents. This makes governments accountable. Others, more insidiously – especially in technology and new media circles – welcome events like this mainly because they involve the internet.

The Afghanistan war logs are a watershed moment in government control over intelligence data. It’s not that battlefield information was published – that’s nothing especially new – but that the release of the information was so huge and co-ordinated between three countries and on the web simultaneously.

Continue reading "Wikileaks: friend of the truth, enemy of the troops?" »

A statement by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy today appears to be a dramatic capitulation on his plan to introduce a mandatory internet filter to censor offensive websites.

It is a stunning turnaround for Conroy who has been so vigorously defending his plan in the face of fierce criticism from a range of quarters this year, including the US Government which took the unusual step of publicly airing concern about the Australian policy.

The legislation was due to be in Parliament by the end of the year but Conroy said today it was on hold, pending a review of the types of websites the filter will block and a number of other measures which address the long-standing concerns of opponents, including appeals for classifications and an independent review of censored content.

If a filter is now ever introduced it appears certain that it will not take the form that Conroy has proposed.

Continue reading "Has Conroy just rolled on the net filter?" »

The response to The Age’s decision to sack Catherine Deveny says a lot about the Australian media and Australian media audiences. In particular, it shows how selective both can be depending on whether they like or dislike the person — and whether it’s a man or woman at the centre of a scandal.

Soon after Deveny’s sacking was announced, some of her supporters in the Twittersphere claimed that she had been a victim of censorship.

It makes Deveny seem heroic, but it’s hard to see this as censorship.In the first place, Deveny wasn’t prevented by The Age from expressing herself. On this occasion at least, they didn’t spike her writings.

Continue reading "Deveny, Kyle, Matty Johns and TT’s rank hypocrisy" »

The more the Prime Minister breaks his policy promises, the more Senator Conroy hides his policy homework.

For more than 2 months Senator Conroy has sat on the taxpayer-funded Implementation Study into the National Broadband Network. And he’s refusing to show how he will implement another promise: mandatory internet filtering.

This week, The Australian reported the Minister’s so-called ‘clean feed’ legislation won’t be introduced before Parliament’s spring sitting. Another Labor government “own-goal” and a vote of ‘no-confidence’ in its own policy promises.

Continue reading "Has the Government shelved the net filter too?" »

Spend a little time reading the rabid, sometimes psychotic, responses to Stephen Conroy’s piece yesterday about the proposed internet filter and you’d be forgiven for thinking the Rudd Government is about to become a one-term wonder or Australia is about to turn into a society about as free as the Third Reich.

The hundreds of comments on the minister’s piece contain a mass of vitriolic, hysterical rage and delusional warnings that the plan could cost Labor power. There were personal attacks on the minister and even a hint at a death threat. “I feel like I’m living in Germany circa 1936,” wrote one contributor. “OK, Conroy, as a Catholic, it is you who believes in myths. You have a rubbish Economics degree and you weren’t born here. Go away,” said another, constructively.

What the debate almost entirely failed to reflect was the overwhelming popularity of Conroy’s plan with the general public. A recent poll put support for mandatory government filtering of child abuse material at 80 per cent. That’s a staggeringly high approval rating for any policy that does not involve handing out wads of free money.

Continue reading "Why Conroy’s critics should censor themselves" »

There is a lot of misinformation circulating about the Government’s ISP-level filtering proposal and Eliza Cussen was right to warn people they shouldn’t believe everything they hear or read (Top Ten Internet Filter Lies, 25 March 2010).

Unfortunately her article repeated some of the misinformation and I’d like to outline the facts.

The Government has always maintained there is no silver bullet when it comes to cyber safety and we have never said ISP-level filtering alone would help fight child pornography or keep children safe online.

Continue reading "Conroy: Don’t believe the myths on the ISP filter" »

The boys and girls I was filming on the beach were mostly pre-teens.

Where are you going to show it? a girl asked. ” On You Tube” I replied.  The kids screamed so loudly with delight the sound on my camera distorted.

I didnt have permission from these kids parents to film them but it was not until the following day that it occurred to me that this might be a problem.

Continue reading "When should images of children be put on the net?" »

The Obama administration has questioned the Rudd Government’s plan to introduce an internet filter on the grounds that it runs contrary to stated US foreign policy of using an open internet to spread economic growth and global security.

The US State Department has told The Punch its officials have raised concerns about the filter with Australian counterparts, as America mounts a new diplomatic assault on internet censorship by governments worldwide.

Asked about the US view on the filter plan US State Department spokesman Noel Clay said: “The US and Australia are close partners on issues related to cyber matters generally, including national security and economic issues.

Continue reading "US reveals concerns over Conroy’s net filter plan" »

If we were cavemen and we came across a sabre tooth tiger, what would we do? Let’s hope we’d run.

We’d know to run if we possessed important information - big cats have big teeth. Cavemen who didn’t have that information wouldn’t have run and wouldn’t have propagated. Information is fundamental to survival and well-being.

Today we live in an incredible era of information. A quarter of the world is online. This number is growing quickly and the amount of information we consume is ballooning. The openness of the Internet gives extraordinary access to information and this is a powerful force for good.

Continue reading "Google: An open web helps keep the bastards honest" »

Just in case Punch readers believe what people tell them, here are some of the things that have been said about internet filtering…and exactly why they shouldn’t be believed.

Lie # 1: The filter will help in the fight against child pornography.

I wish this were true. But it isn’t. Even child protection group, Save The Children, has come out exposing Conroy’s plan as unworkable and the wrong way to protect children online. The filter will not (and Stephen Conroy admits this) work for the areas where unwanted material actually lives, namely: peer-to-peer networking, instant messaging, torrents, direct emails and chat rooms.

Continue reading "Top 10 internet filter lies" »

Governments keep secrets sometimes. We all accept that. But you might be surprised to discover just how ingrained – ridiculously so, in some cases – the concept of secrecy is in Australia’s federal laws.

Disclosing classified security information to a foreign spy is an imprisonable offence.

But so is the unauthorised disclosure of subsidies paid to Australian dairy producers. Or details of the operation of the dental benefits scheme.

Continue reading "A chance to tackle the culture of secrecy in government" »

The NSW government have released a set of recommendations that would place responsibility for the work of a grubby network of international paedophiles and child exploiters on a handful of innocent visual artists.

Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday the Attorney-General John Hatzistergos said the NSW government would support new legislation that makes a “clear legal distinction between pornography and art” in order to protect victims and make it easier for police to prosecute cases of child pornography and exploitation

With plans to scrap the defence of “artistic merit” while asking artists to fork out up to $500 per image for Commonwealth classification, Hatzistergos’ recommendations are taking a stab at a group, who up until 2008 had stayed fairly shy of scrutiny in Australia.

Continue reading "Art is the not the enemy in the fight against child porn" »

Unpredictable, addictive and unrestricted. Chatroulette has sparked a cult following, countless YouTube clips, a new genre of shocked screen-grabs, and at last, mainstream coverage.

It could now draw the attention of would-be censors.

John Herrman, from Gizmodo.com calls Chatroulette, “speed-dating the entire Internet”. In an instant, you’re connected bedroom-to-bedroom with one of 20 thousand online strangers, anywhere in the world, be it dorm, cafe or basement lair.

The result is a hybrid of Skype and Peep-Show. If your chat partner is bored, they flick you to another round of spin of the bottle. It’s a return to the Internet’s Wild Wild West, argues NY Magazine - a lawless place for thrill-seekers, voyeurs, artists and freaks.

Continue reading "Is Chatroulette.com playing Russian with the censors?" »

As cynical as it might sound you can’t help but think that Communications Minister Stephen Conroy would have been relieved last week’s media scrutiny was mainly soaked up by Peter Garrett’s problems with roof insulation.

But following the Sunday Herald-Sun revelation that he went skiing with Channel Seven chief Kerry Stokes shortly before handing out $250 million to the TV stations it means he’ll at least be continuing in his role as best supporting stuff-up.
Political cliché that it is, Conroy’s decision to hang out with Stokes on the slopes goes to the Minister’s judgment and it’s that judgment Kevin Rudd must really be beginning to question.

Continue reading "Is it time for Rudd to exterminate the Dalek?" »

The Defence Department posted this image from Afghanistan on its website on Tuesday. As you can see, the faces of the Australian soldiers were obscured.

For security reasons, we have decided to also obscure the faces of the Afghans in the photo.

The Defence Department released this photo along with a media release, which explained the men pictured were village elders and religious leaders of Chenartu, north-east of Tarin Kowt. The photo shows the Afghans laughing and getting on well with members of Australia’s Special Operations Task Group as they engage with Afghan communities across Oruzgan province.

Continue reading "First casualty of war is truth, closely followed by logic" »

Government security sources have told The Punch the attacks on the official Parliament website have also spread to the Attorney-Generals, Communications and the Department of Immigration.

The attack is believed to have been carried out by a loose coalition of hackers known as Anonymous who have previously claimed responsibility for attacks on the Church of Scientology.

A couple of days ago when Communication Minister Stephen Conroy was asked about the possibility of attacks by hacker groups on Government website he basically laughed it off. One wonders whether Mr Conroy is laughing today.

Continue reading "Website attacks spread throughout Government" »

We’re often keen to highlight the democratic benefits of social media, especially in bringing greater openness to a country such as Iran.

But this week, in Australia, we’ve seen a debate over online political censorship, with the banning of Facebook groups such as “KEVIN RUDD = EPIC FAIL”, that it makes you wonder if we’ve forgotten that the power of social media lies in its ability to embrace dissent and criticism.

In the online world, dissent is not just allowed. It is central to social media’s political power.

Continue reading "Bad week for free speech on social media" »

It was the week in which the words “Macquarie Banker” finally became rhyming slang after a member of the millionaire’s factory was caught perving on jpegs of Miranda Kerr during a live cross about interest rates.

The week in which the words “cyberbully” and “tweet” were listed for inclusion in a Macquarie of a different kind.

It was also the week in which one of the most old-fashioned politicians in Australia, a man who seemed puzzled enough by the 20th century and is really struggling with the 21st, blundered into a raging cyber-storm which had the potential to blow away a government seeking re-election in just seven weeks’ time.

Continue reading "How a political luddite got smashed in cyberspace" »

Yesterday, we told you about the South Australian government’s attempts at internet censorship.

Today, we can reveal that online political speech has been dealt another blow with Facebook, the popular social networking site, being accused of political censorship after it removed the group “KEVIN RUDD = EPIC FAIL”.

Before it was removed the Facebook group is understood to have had over 3000 members and focused on building a list what it described as Kevin Rudd’s broken promises.

Continue reading "More censorship? Rudd ‘epic fail’ group goes offline" »

UPDATE 11.55pm: SA Attorney General Mick Atkinson has backed down and will repeal the ban on anonymous internet comments.

It is self-evident that websites can be used by imposters and small-time fraudsters to create a false reflection of public opinion on political issues. But there’s no excuse for the South Australian government’s breathtaking censorship tactics ahead of the state election.

Sure, anonymous comments are a problem. There’s a guy posting on the Punch lately who has assumed 21 different identities in four days. He first came on the radar at the weekend after he left a tell-tail trail by posting two similar comments in quick succession. He could have been immediately banned but was given rope.

On a single thread he posted under the names Ronnel, James, Wendy, Rachel, Brad, Jan, Bill, Roger, Janette, Francis, Annie, Randall, Brendon, Judith and Connie. Though I’ve never met him I have an unusually clear picture of what he looks like, which is as follows.

Continue reading "Rann’s sledgehammer too big for online nuts" »

The proposal this year to remove the artistic defence from the NSW proposed legislation on child abuse, which includes child pornography and exploitation, is not particularly about censoring artists. 

In fact, the Australia Council for the Arts believes that the proposal, which will harmonise NSW laws with the Commonwealth laws on the definitions of child pornography, has the potential to be advantageous to genuine artistic expression. 

Mention art and pornography together, and people immediately position themselves at opposite ends of the room.

Continue reading "Why artists should not fear child protection reforms" »

We all know that sex sells. Some of the earliest tobacco advertising featured stylised drawings of starlets inserted in cigarette packs.

Sexy images of women are used to sell everything, from cars to spring water to internet access.Many such ads are targeted at men, but ads for products aimed at women are often similar.

Not only are sexually provocative images of women used to advertise, but they are routinely featured on television, music video clips, movies and even toys.  While adults are better equipped to deal with the bombardment of sexualised content, we need to stop to consider the impact it has on children.

Continue reading "Why should children be exposed to videos like this?" »

Australians see 26 January as a day to celebrate the diversity and tolerance of Australian society.

So why did hundreds of our favourite websites fade to black this Australia Day?

It’s apparently the Great Australian Internet Blackout.

Continue reading "The Coalition isn’t convinced net filtering will protect kids" »

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.

Continue reading "Vacuous critics give censorship a good name" »

Alcoholics call it a moment of clarity. Oprah calls it an “ah-ha moment”.

Whatever you call it, a penny dropping is a wondrous thing, and yesterday amid the rabid brouhaha of Stephen Conroy’s Clean Feed catastrophe, I banked some vital coin.

Perhaps I’m slow, perhaps I’m a bit thick, but it wasn’t until reading the key findings of Catharine Lumby’s document on the proposed Internet filtering, that I realised I was operating under the false assumption that the web should be subjected to the same scrutiny as any other creative product.

Continue reading "The time has come for an Internet Bill Of Rights" »

As we expected, there has been considerable online discussion about our announcement to introduce ISP-level filtering.

For those who missed it, the Government announced legislation that will require Australian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block web pages that under the National Classification System are rated RC (Refused Classification). RC-rated material includes child sex abuse content, bestiality, sexual violence including rape and the detailed instruction of crime or drug use.

The Government has always maintained there is no silver-bullet solution to cyber-safety and this new measure is one part of a comprehensive suite to address the range of challenges online. For example, we have funded 91 Australian Federal Police officers to the Child Protection Operations Team, as well as extensive education programs for parents, teachers and children.

Continue reading "The truth about net filtering" »

In August this year I wrote on this site about the lunacy of the Rudd Government’s proposed mandatory ISP internet filtering.

At that stage it was a trial but on Tuesday this week Minister Conroy announced his intention to proceed with legislation to enact this mad idea.

This is a policy that is based on a fraud so much so the Minister could barely explain it with a straight face yesterday.

Continue reading "Net filtering ‘plan’ is a fraud" »

I once stumbled into a child porn chatroom. I was working at a magazine and having one of those “Hey, does anyone know if…?” conversations beloved of journos where we meander into oddball topics, debate them vigorously and call it work.

On this day, we were trying to remember whether Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of The Boy Scouts, was a confirmed paedo or whether it’s just that the organisation itself has the sour whiff of the kiddy-fiddler about it and we were wrongly maligning him. I Googled (or possibly Yahooed – this was a good seven years ago) something along the lines of ‘scouts, paedophilia, Baden-Powell”.

And before I knew it I’d clicked though to a site flooded with hundreds, possibly thousands of posts and replies from men defending – and describing - their lust (both imagined and enacted) for pre-pubescent children.

Continue reading "Child welfare is more important than net freedom" »

Computer nerds hate Senator Stephen Conroy’s plan to filter the Internet so that material which is refused classification (RC) becomes harder to access. But instead of moaning about how it might slow the Net or limit freedom of speech, they should just build a better filter that actually works.

Don’t doubt that geeks can do it. Napster, the late-90s phenomenon that shocked the music industry by enabling music piracy on a vast scale was written by a lone teenager. BitTorrent, the protocol currently used by millions of people around the world to share illegal copies of films and TV shows, was also created by a lone geek. Twitter was whipped up in few days of frenzied programming.

Sadly, some of the tools that geeks have created are now favourites of the perverts, criminals and hatemongers who want to access the vile material that Senator Conroy wants Internet Service Providers to block. Perverts uses these tools because they are far harder to detect than other methods of finding Internet nasties, leading to entirely justified criticism that the filter is a largely futile exercise that will drive creeps underground.

Continue reading "Hey geeks, stop the whining and build a better filter" »

Australia has an international reputation as visionary for the way we managed the HIV epidemic in the 1980s. While countries like the US were being sidetracked by extremists claiming the virus was a sign God was venting his wrath on homosexuals, Australians acted rationally.

Our governments, our health experts and our media got the message out: HIV was primarily spread through blood and semen. Safer sex and injecting practices could stem the tide.

If you go online today you’ll find countless websites devoted to that message. Many of them are hosted overseas. Many of them give detailed instructions on drug injection and describe, in necessarily explicit language, sexual activity that would be deemed illegal to show in a film made for entertainment purposes under Australian law.

Continue reading "Sex, drugs, and other things you can’t read about" »

Since the inception of modern democracy, the separation of powers has functioned as a guarantor of individual liberty and honesty in government. In 1901, the Commonwealth implemented this principle through the creation of autonomous and competing branches and agencies, each serving to keep the others in their proper place.

“Our system of government is one of checks and balances,” wrote former Treasurer Peter Costello. “Checks and balances prevent us from the excesses that misguided ideas might otherwise lead to.”

But over the past two years, those checks and balances have been seriously eroded by Kevin Rudd’s obsession with centralised power and micromanaged administration.

Continue reading "Big Brother alive and well in Canberra" »

Much like handing out condoms with the tip cut off won’t help fight STDs, the Rudd Government’s plan to filter the internet of Refused Classification material won’t make the internet safe for children.

Before the 2007 election Labor promised they would “ensure that children are protected from harmful and inappropriate online material” by introducing mandatory content filtering of all websites at the Internet Service Provider (ISP) level.

One might have thought that they were promising to make the internet safe for children.  It certainly sounded like it.  With the great firewall of Australia in place parents would be able leave their children in the capable hands of Uncle Kevin, net nanny extraordinaire.

Continue reading "Call it an ISP filter Kevin but your logic leaks like a sieve" »

In the dying days of the1996 election campaign Paul Keating famously said “when you change the government, you change the country” in an attempt to scare people away from taking the baseball bat to his Prime Ministership.  He did it on the basis that the Australian people recognised John Howard and what he had stood for over the years.  The line didn’t work, the government changed and so to did the country.

In 2007 when the doom of the campaign set in, John Howard used the same line to try and get people to focus on what Kevin Rudd really stood for.  This was ultimately a difficult task because at that time what Rudd offered the public was one great contradiction. 

For instance he had described the day of the introduction of the GST as “fundamental injustice day” but campaigned as an “economic conservative”. 

Continue reading "The column on Kevin Rudd you wouldn’t get in the post" »

Sitting in front of a blank computer screen is confronting, but strangely quite liberating.

There is a glimmer of anticipation, of unknown opportunity. There is a sense of freedom – now that is a strange coincidence. It is actually a sudden, unexpected challenge to my freedom that crowds my thoughts.

Who would have thought that in 2009, I would be sitting at my desk in the Australian Parliament, earnestly searching the internet for quotations about censorship?

Continue reading "Censoring our collective right to criticise the government" »

Is Labor aiming for a one party state?

One party states always make a big deal about their constitutional guarantees for citizens rights and their ability to vote, but just for one party.

Well, federal Labor seems to lust for such an outcome.

Continue reading "Words you won’t see in the mail on Kevin Rudd" »

I was a bit of a front row nerd at school - it comes with the territory of being State Under 12 Chess Champion in 1983. 

I can clearly remember one occasion at school when I put my hand up to answer the teacher’s question and felt a sharp whack on my head.  Someone from the back of the room had scored a direct hit with a rubber. I looked around but could not identify the culprit.  The teacher didn’t see a thing. 

Needless to say from that moment on I kept my hand down, and my views to myself.  Today I see something similar happening on the Internet, and today’s ‘rubber’ is ‘the anonymous comment’. 

Continue reading "Massive fail - the anti-social world of social media" »

There’s a big crack in the dam of official censorship today. An attempt by one of Britain’s most formidable law firms to stop media coverage of one of its clients backfired spectacularly when the information it was seeking to suppress was distributed around the internet to millions of users in a matter of hours.

In what will become a case study for how the internet has changed the balance of power in the control of information, solicitors Carter-Ruck and their client Trafigura were forced to drop an attempt to gag media coverage of an 87-word parliamentary question about the alleged dumping of toxic waste off Ivory Coast.

The question was on the public record and available on the internet yet The Guardian was prevented from reporting the question, who asked it, or why it was being gagged.

Continue reading "When the web makes a fool of censorship" »

A few weeks ago I had one of my worst days as a new MP. A woman came to see me in my office in Caringbah in southern Sydney and told me the appalling story of how her child was being exposed to pornography by the child’s own father.

The child is less than five years old. I won’t go into the other details for risk of identifying the individuals involved, but rest assured it would make the most tolerant and liberal thinking of readers angry and sick.

What is worse is that as we looked to see what remedies were available to help this mum protect her child, we found there were none – and the police confirmed as much to her.

Continue reading "Protect kids from porn in the family home" »

We all want our kids to be safe online. Parents can’t be expected to monitor every click and it’s understandable that we’re looking to government for help.

But Mr Rudd’s plan to assemble a government generated list of unacceptable sites then demand Internet Service Providers (ISPs) monitor each page we visit is a step in the wrong direction.

ISPs direct internet traffic much like a post office delivers mail. Requiring them to examine the contents of transmitted data is like requiring the post office to read our mail before it’s delivered.

Continue reading "Rudd’s internet nanny plan targets the wrong enemy" »

Does anyone else find it quite frankly perverse that in affluent first-world Australia so much time is spent fretting about the supposed weight problems of our children when UNICEF figures show five thousand kids across the globe die every day essentially because they can’t get a clean glass of water?

I sure as hell do. But here we go again. Last week the Rudd Government’s Preventative Health Task Force Report called for a ban on junk food advertising on TV before 9:00pm and for the use of toys, cartoon characters and celebrities that appeal to children to be phased out. But the Australian Communications and Media Authority is against the banning of those TV ads.

The reaction? A seething white-hot fury coming from nice middle class homes all over Sydney. How can anyone possibly put corporate profits before our kids’ health?

Continue reading "Junk food doesn’t make kids fat - junk parents do" »

I’m going to do something here that most pollies wouldn’t do and ask for help. Help in trying to address Australia’s $16bn alcohol toll. I want the readers of The Punch to leave a comment and share their ideas on how governments can address Australia’s binge drinking culture and the violence which stems from it.

Three years ago I took a 10 point plan to both John Howard and Kevin Rudd. It included advertising restrictions and health warning labels.

But with that plan shot down its now time for fresh ideas as this a real issue which this country as a whole needs to take responsibility for.

Continue reading "Our drunk nation" »

In the past few months we have seen the highs and lows of our relationship with China on display.

Firstly we saw Australia avoid recession largely because of the strong demand by China for Australia’s resources. 

Then we saw a series of diplomatic incidents including the arrest of Australian businessman Stern Hu on grounds which are yet to become clear.  In addition it appears the Chinese Government has taken proactive action to show their displeasure at Australia for granting a visa to Chinese dissident leader Rebiya Kadeer.

Continue reading "Spot the difference between China and Stephen Conroy" »

Confined to a wheelchair and wearing a pith helmet and an American flag fashioned into a nappy, shouting obscenities at the justices of the United States Supreme Court, pornographer Larry Flynt was a massively flawed hero for the cause of free speech.

This morally bankrupt hillbilly was famously sued for defamation by the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who in a fake advertisement for Campari published by Flynt’s Hustler magazine recalled how he lost his virginity by sleeping with his own mother in an outside toilet on the family pig farm.

It’s hard to imagine a more egregious slur. Nor a more unbelievable one, which is one of the reasons Flynt ultimately won his defamation battle, reinforcing the free speech protections afforded by the First Amendment.

Continue reading "I’m glad that this shocking drongo is back on the air" »

Superficially, it’s an arthouse issue that affects a small number of culture vultures and cineastes who won’t see a movie unless it’s got subtitles.

It’s actually one of the most compelling and alarming stories in Australia today, as it shows how the most pernicious features of a totalitarian regime have been imported into our own country. And we should all be rallying behind its victim, the Melbourne Film Festival, as it tries to defend freedom of expression and assembly in the face of intimidation on behalf of the Chinese dictatorship.

The Punch spoke last night with the director of the festival, Richard Moore, who is trying to manage this event against a backdrop of website hacking, telephone sabotage, suspected surveillance and direct threats, all from supporters of Beijing who want the festival to pull one of its movies and cancel the Melbourne visit by the woman it profiles.

Continue reading "China exports censorship to an Australian film festival" »

The Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow with a local community church has opened a new exhibition that originally aimed to “reclaim the Bible as a sacred text”.

.

In a somewhat unorthodox way of achieving this end they have left a Bible open at the exhibition inviting people to write whatever they want in it.

“If you feel you have been excluded from the Bible, please write your way back into it,” asks the gallery.

Continue reading "Bible bashing is easy, but would artists touch Islam?" »

Nothing that follows is personally approved by David Penberthy or Rupert Murdoch, let alone Kevin Rudd. That’s the beauty of writing for a free media in a democracy.

However, it’s equally ludicrous to suggest that every word that appears in China’s state-owned media every day represents the personal views of Chinese president Hu Jintao.

I don’t know Hu - who really does? - but I’m not sure he would have chosen the noun “perfidy” to describe Rio Tinto’s betrayal of Chinalco a couple of months back. Yet that phrase was quickly interpreted as the semi-official, if colourful, position of China Inc to the collapse of the deal - purely because it ran on the “state-owned” Xinhua news agency.

Continue reading "How a man’s jailing exposed China’s state-run spin" »

Restaurants are defensive of their hygene in the same way that newspapers are defensive of the accuracy of their reporting. Phone up and complain and the last thing either will do is admit liability. And nowadays when people are treated shabbily they turn to the internet. Or me.

What surprises me is the number of emails and comments that come my way from diners who’ve returned home from some of Australia’s top restaurants only to fall ill. I have become, you might say, shit-central - and vomit-central - of the blog world.

The truth is for what I see is there is a good chance you may become ill eating out although not always is it the restaurant’s fault.

Apart from the food authorities in NSW, the food inspection Stasi can’t really be bothered to help diners.

Continue reading "Eaaaarggh…what really made you sick last night" »

The online virtual world of Northrend -  complete with Gnomes, Dwarves, Warlocks and Dragons – was the last place I expected to find people swearing about Kevin Rudd.

I can’t remember the torrent of abuse exactly ‘cept that the oedipal noun was used a few times.

The beef? Their world, in the massively popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW) played by 11.5 million people worldwide, could be headed for the Rudd Government’s dreaded internet blacklist.

Broadband and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has confirmed the Government is looking at blocking all online content that is refused classification – ie exceeds the maximum MA15+ rating in Australia.

This, according to Conroy’s spokesman is just enforcing laws agreed by the States and Territories that say it’s illegal to buy, sell or play games deemed too explicit for those 15 years or younger.

Continue reading "World of Warcraft’s ultimate force of evil: Kevin Rudd" »

On Wednesday night China’s censors temporarily blocked Google and Gmail, an essential part of my communication with friends and family in Australia and used more than 20 million Chinese.

It was perhaps naive and even a little old fashioned of me to rely on just one e-mail account in Beijing. I know that the country’s net nanny is unpredictable and have been watching the escalating feud between the government and the world’s most popular search engine, which is being accused of containing excessive links to pornography.

The outage happened at about 9.30pm. A friend telephoned me and said that Google had been blocked. I tried several times to open Google.com and Gmail but the pages either timed out or I received a message that the connection was interrupted. China-based site Google.cn was also down.

Continue reading "When China pulls the plug on the Internet" »

Until last week, I thought the silliest casualty of modern warfare was the word “bomb”, which in many news reports had become known by the acronym IED, or improvised explosive device.

IED might be a handy term for military strategists needing to distinguish between a mortar fired from a well-equipped conventional unit of soldiers and a bucket full of fertiliser and nails left by an anonymous freelancer in a car on a crowded street in Baghdad, but to the media, any explosive device whose detonation imperils those in the immediate vicinity should, provided it’s not Barry Hall after giving away a couple of 50s, be simply referred to as what it is: a bomb.

To do otherwise simply buries the true horror of the incident under a comforting layer of jargon.

Continue reading "ABC drops the F-bomb" »

My nine-year-old has been waging a campaign to see the South Park movie for six months now. I’ve said ‘No’. It’s a funny movie but there’s a scene in it, featured below, where Saddam Hussein has sex with Satan. I figure you have to be at least ten years old to process that joke.

Naturally, my son did what all well-raised and obedient children do when their parents ban something. He waited until I was cooking dinner and he YouTubed it. It was a smart move – he got to watch all the rude bits without any of the annoying political satire.

As I write this column, I’m in London attending a conference on children and cybersafety. I have no doubt that my son is reveling in my absence. My exhausted partner will surely fall asleep early at some point and my son will sneak upstairs to type naughty words into Google.

Continue reading "Kids’ healthy curiosity more powerful than censorship" »

On the campaign trail in 2007, the ALP promised to make cyberspace a safer place for children.  Strangely, this is one election promise that has fiercely stuck its ground. 

Australia may soon enjoy the dubious honour of being the world’s first liberal democracy to legislatively mandate internet filtering.

The original proposal creates a mandatory ISP-level filter.  Recent debate suggests a ‘voluntary’ scheme, whereby ISP licensing agreements include a filtering clause.  The ALP has not updated its original documentation. Significantly, this change removes the process from legislative scrutiny (read: goodbye transparency and accountability).

In terms of what content the filter will allow end users to access, however, the difference is rhetorical: either way, ISPs will filter what users can access.

Continue reading "No web filter will stop child pornography" »

Choc tops. Check. Obesity inducing fizzy drinks. Check. Two seven year olds. Check. Negligent parenting. Check.

Time to set school holidays brain to snooze. The film is PG and Disney: Race To Witch Mountain.

The plot concerns alien beings that take the shape of children and are gently helped back to their spaceship by Dwayne Johnson – exactly the kind of caring behaviour you’d expect of a former professional wrestler known as The Rock.

Parental nap rudely interrupted when the frantic gunfire starts.

Continue reading "Buckle up kiddies, it’s a Walt Disney gorefest" »

KELLIE from Hi-5 has always been a favourite at our place. The kids also seem to like her. But at the risk of sounding like the Reverend Fred Nile, I’m a bit disappointed with her semi-clad efforts on the pages of Ralph.

Not angry. Not suggesting the photos should be banned, nor pretending that I didn’t have a discreet squizz at them like many other dads. Not questioning her right as a 34-year-old woman to engage in some entry-level eroticism to avoid being pigeon-holed as a cheesy children’s entertainer. Just annoyed that I might find myself having a conversation with our six-year-old daughter which begins: “Dad, isn’t that Kellie from Hi-5?”

The woman shouldn’t be crucified for doing what she did and the reaction from family groups and feminists to her shoot has been over the top.

Women’s Forum Australia spokeswoman Melinda Tankard Reist described the photos as an “abuse of her position with tens of thousands of little girls looking up to her”, as if from here to eternity Kel should be quarantined to a life of G-rated entertainment despite no longer being a member of the children’s group. But Tankard Reist was on the money when she said the problem was that Kel’s appearance on the cover was “particularly problematic because magazines like Ralph are on shop shelves at kiddy eye level”.

Continue reading "Dad, isn’t that Kellie from Hi-5? What’s she wearing?" »