Porn in Australia soon to be under fire AGAIN

[Deuce Bigolo]

Either can have the title its a mute point although given the Europe v America agricultural war OZ is the lame duck/easier target

The only reason OZ is supporting America in anything it does is for trade...nothing else

[Deano!]

Trumpton wrote:

> Howard has been Australia's longest serving PM.
>

No, that was Robert Menzies who was bossman for 15 tears through the 50's and 60's. He bunged on a posh pommy accent and loved the Queen.

[eduardo]

[eduardo]

I thought all you aussies loved "our" queen?

After all she is your head of state and reigning monarch of the superior..........sorry meant mother country?

Only joking mate but I've spent some time in Australia some years ago and always loved a bit of friendly banter with you lot.

[Trumpton]

Deano! wrote:

> Trumpton wrote:
>
> > Howard has been Australia's longest serving PM.
> >
>
> No, that was Robert Menzies who was bossman for 15 tears
> through the 50's and 60's. He bunged on a posh pommy accent and
> loved the Queen.

!oops!

[jj]

Did she love him back?

[Deuce Bigolo]

Fixing the symptoms and not the real problems in remote communities IMHO

Create meaningful employment and most of the problems will dissipate

Can't wait to see how their going to police this new legislation

They've similar laws on alcohol in town which have proved totally ineffective

[mart]

Thought you might like to read a (relatively) local comment.

NZ Listener
August 25-31 2007 Vol 210 No 3511
Sites unseen
by Russell Brown
The Australian Government has announced a $189 million internet clean-up package, but putting it into practice will be harder than politicians think.
Last year, NetAlert, an advisory body created by the Australian Government, published a report on the viability of an idea on which the government had been quite keen: requiring internet service providers (ISPs) to install filtering software on their servers to block porn‑ography and other undesirable content.
The results were less than stellar: the filters degraded network performance by between 18 and 78 percent. And though the vendors of the respective filters were handed a cheat-sheet in advance to ?tune? their software, only one product blocked all the prohibited sites. Blocking of prohibited categories of sites was even less efficient: the most effective product blocked three-quarters, the least only 59 percent.
The report made little effort to determine how many apparently acceptable websites had been incorrectly blocked, but noted that in user tests ?some of the filters caused some websites to be blocked unnecessarily or interrupted tasks at critical points?, and ?in some scenarios filters crashed entirely or caused error messages to appear in the browser window that could not be recovered?.
The upshot was clear enough: even in tests under the most favourable conditions, ISP-level filtering looked like a bad idea. The real-world results of such a national system hardly bore thinking about, especially as the report concluded that the largest ISPs would have the most problems with filtering.
It clearly made more sense for parents wanting to control their children?s access to undesirable internet content to run filtering software on their own PCs. The government promised $93 million to fund free distribution of such software.
At the time of writing, the NetAlert report is not available ? I fished it out of a Google cache. Indeed, the entire NetAlert site is unavailable. Late last month, it was taken down for ?redevelopment?.
The redeveloped site may be back online as you read this. It is unusual and unnecessary to remove a public website in the course of developing an updated version. What is going on?
It?s an election year. And, clearly unwilling to be outflanked on any issue of child protection, the government has performed a backflip on ISP filtering.
When then Labor leader Kim Beazley last year announced a mandated ?clean feed? ISP service as party policy, Communications Minister Helen Coonan quoted the NetAlert report to decry the idea as expensive and of ?questionable benefit?.
But suddenly the idea is government policy, as part of a $189 million package aimed at ?cleaning up the internet?, announced by Coonan and PM John Howard, who unveiled it in a live webcast to more than 700 churches.
The package also includes money for free filtering software for home PCs, a phone hotline, a $40 million education campaign for schools and millions more for a federal police team that monitors internet chat rooms looking for predators.

There are any number of problems with the rhetoric. Quite distinct issues ? access to offensive content, online predation of teenagers and child pornography ? have been conflated. The actual rate of online predation ? especially as compared to risks in the real world, where Australia has a lamentably high rate of sexual assault ? is very low.
I was unable to find any record of a single sexual assault initiated via internet contact by a stranger in Australia, but the government?s own crime surveys indicate around 70,000 sexual assaults annually in the real world, almost all by people known to the victim. And yet the government?s funding boost for police teams to detect grooming is nearly three times the entire $16.5 million founding budget for its National Initiative to Combat Sexual Assault.
It will not be compulsory for any household to adopt home PC filtering software or ISP filtering, but all users will feel the drag on performance if, as the government expects, millions of families do opt for ISP filtering. The government has hinted that it expects libraries to introduce filtering.
Moreover, the mere existence of a government-controlled nationwide internet-filtering system ? one that aims to cover not just web content, but email, chat and peer-to-peer file exchange ? seems to offer an unwelcome temptation both to expand its scope and to make it compulsory. When the system launches, it will use a blacklist of websites that includes not only pornography, but also some deemed by a government agency to be ?terror? sites.
Election year is taking Australian politicians down a fairly strange road.

Email: russb@dubwise.co.nzrussbj@dubwkise.c2o.nzj

All content ?2003-2007 APN Holdings NZ Ltd. All rights reserved.

[Deuce Bigolo]

Pretty much on the money

My take is that 2 incidents which resulted in murders lit the powderkeg

2 16year old E.M.Os who suicided(hanging)were known to frequent some pretty extreme sites which talked about self harm as a means of coping

1 15 year old who met some online chat pals and ended up dead


All i can say i hope common sense prevails and a watered down version of black listed sites like those used by spyblaster,ie-spyad & spybot is used in its place

I feel sorry for the families loss but thats no reason for the draconian measures being proposed

As we well know...banning something just drives it underground even further

[jj]

V interesting- typical of politicos to go for something that hasn't even
been adequately 'bench-tested' as a knee-jerk response to a problem
they haven't even understood properly.