Wednesday, 22nd March, 2006

C.J.Dennis defines the term: ‘Wowser: an ineffably pious person who mistakes this world for a penitentiary and himself for a warder’. A good description of the Kim Beazley who is now trying to change the Labor Party in to a supporter of the Nanny State. His Moral Rearmament background has come to the fore as he promises a Labor Government will force internet service providers to sell "a clean feed" that filters pornographic and violent content before it reaches households. Parental responsibility is to become a thing of the past. Parents are too stupid to control their own children or instal filters on their own PCs. The Government knows best and, under the Beazley plan, media regulators would declare unsuitable material blacklisted.

The website Crikey.com quoted Irene Graham, Executive Director of Electronic Frontiers Australia, as saying Beazley is "pretty much making the same claims that a bunch of fundamentalist Christian groups have been claiming for the last six months.We're back to trying to turn the internet into a kindergarten." According to reports commissioned by the federal government , it would be incredibly costly to "install and maintain the system that Beazley is proposing," says Graham. It's currently compulsory for ISPs to make filter software affordable for parents, says Graham, which is a "much more sensible" option.

On its website Electronic Frontiers draws attention to the origin of the Beazley plan.

"It seems that Labor is playing copy cat in launching, as their own, a tired old policy developed and launched three years ago (on 3 March 2003) by The Australia Institute. The Australia Institute's proposal was also the basis of the Family First Party's mandatory ISP filtering policy launched in August 2004 shortly before the Federal election. About 12 months later, in August 2005, fundamentalist religious organisations stepped up their lobbying campaign for mandatory ISP filtering, also based on the Australia Institute's scheme. Has the Australia Institute's impractical and unworkable scheme now become Labor's policy?"