Australian Penthouse

What the hell is going on with online censorship? What will the proposed online filter really mean for everyday Australians, and is derailing such a filter the best solution to Australia’s censorship problems?

Story: Meg White

My initial response to coverage of the Australian Government’s mandatory Internet-filtering proposal was one of horror. Righteous indignation, outrage, an abiding disillusionment…

Fuck the man, man.

I read every bit of ‘available’ information I could find, cross-checking Government interviews with expert opinion and citizen interpretation. The picture that this process painted was a bleak one indeed. As a ‘digital native’, I experienced the Internet-filtering proposal as an almost personal attack; certainly an attack on what I felt were my personal liberties, and certainly an attempt to hobble the great power of knowledge in what should be an informed democracy.

It was in this mindset that I wrote out my preliminary summary of the situation. It became the first draft; the well from which I drew all of my queries and my attitude towards the official parties perpetrating this monumental wrong. I was pretty sure of myself. But as I shot questions off to the relevant departments, that preliminary draft fell to pieces in my hands.

On almost every query, I was issued with a resounding “no” from the ivory towers of Government.

It did not take long for me to realise that most of the ‘available’ information on Internet filtering was mostly fictional, and wholly useless. People had made incorrect deductions, and those deductions had borne a faulty premise, upon which we’d erected a rash of faulty arguments.

And this is the real danger of the current filtering discourse. It runs on an economy of misinformation and doublespeak, and that quickly becomes a zero-sum game. There are genuine issues dogging this proposal, but at the moment they’re sharing space with fairytales and taking a back seat to real issues in terms of the attention they garner.

Much of the confusion appears to be sustained by a misunderstanding of the Refused Classification category; the category of material that will be blacklisted. This is the axis on which claims of political regulation and censorship seem to turn most readily.

The banning of the Neda Agha-Soltan shooting video, for example, or the banning of websites featuring topics such as abortion, euthanasia and homosexuality are all symptoms of the confusion surrounding the ways in which Refused Classification interacts with the idea of prohibited content.

Let me clear that up right now: Refused Classification is a category of its own and is comprised of material that cannot be classified G, PG, M, MA or X. It is completely separate to the category of prohibited content, which contains RC material, but also captures content that has been classified MA15+ or R18+ when not subjected to a restricted-access system.

Currently, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) blacklist—which has been in place for nine years—is a collection of content that has been classified ‘prohibited’.

It took me three weeks, but I managed to confirm that the current ACMA blacklist is not the list that will be driving the Internet-filtering blacklist. We have it in writing.

Suzie Brady, Media Advisor to Senator Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, penned the words: “This is not the list of content that will be filtered under the policy.”

She also said, “The National Classification Scheme makes no reference to political content. Discussions on topics such as euthanasia and abortion will not be blocked unless they include detailed instruction in drug use.”

So you can, in part, put that concern to rest.

The list of accusations the Government denies goes on.

Claims that the technology will slow Internet performance, over-filter innocent content and ultimately fail in its purported goal are met with official assurance that the evidence says otherwise. Concerns about the transparency of the ‘secret blacklist’ have been assuaged through an open submission for ideas on how to keep the list transparent without undermining its effectiveness in any way. When detractors claim that Australia is the only democracy with such a comprehensive filtering program, the Government insists there are 15 other Western democracies using ISP-based filtering of “objectionable content”.

It’s not all freedom of speech and cotton candy, though. What we’re dealing with is a complaints-based filter that “brings the treatment of overseas-hosted content into line by requiring ISPs to block overseas content that has been identified as RC.”

With very vague terminology such as “[offends] against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults” dooming content to an RC rating, there are some interesting ramifications for the Net filter.

According to Zahra Stardust, Australian Sex Party candidate and human rights lawyer, there will definitely be consequences for those with personal or professional stakes in the adult world.

“Because Australia’s X18+ category—introduced under the Howard Government in 2000—is far narrower in its parameters than equivalent ratings in Europe and the United States, material featuring ‘fetish’ falls outside the category and is Refused Classification. As such, practices such as ‘body piercing, application of substances such as candle wax, ‘golden showers’, bondage, spanking or fisting’ would be Refused Classification and banned under the proposed filtering scheme,” she said.

Female ejaculation will fall prey to the fetish stamp as well because the Classification Board believes it is a practice that depicts urination.

But that doesn’t even touch on the most pressing issue of the filtering scandal.

“Senator Conroy’s mandatory Internet-filtering scheme—colloquially dubbed the Great Australian Firewall or Rabbit Proof Firewall—threatens to impinge upon human rights and freedoms if it is implemented in the coming weeks,” claimed Zahra.

“The modern-day equivalent to book burning, the censorship scheme is unlike that in any other Western democracy, and was initiated by the same Minister who banned access to the Australian Sex Party website for people working in his department.”

Sam McLean, of political activist group GetUp!, agreed.

“I think there is a very strong and very valid civil liberties argument against this, which has been expressed by many members of the Labor Party and the Liberal Party,” he told Penthouse. “It’s not the Government’s role to be telling Australians what to view online, and to do so in a manner which is completely untransparent by its very nature. There is no way that Australians can see what is being censored because it’s a secret blacklist.”

And the question is, why? This filter doesn’t effectively interrupt the trafficking of paedophilic material, it will pose little difficulty to those who wish to bypass it, and it will cost billions in tax-payer dollars and national integrity. So why pursue it with so little regard for public response?

I asked that question in as many ways and through as many channels as I possibly could, and the closest thing I got to an adequate answer came from Suzie Brady: “The Government believes there is some content that has no place in a civilised society.”

This whole campaign has been pushed as a ‘save the children’ initiative. When pressed, it became a matter of saving the children and the animals and the law-abiding folk from fringe element perverts and terrorists. But that quote from Suzie Brady is closer to the truth than any of it, and this is the aspect of the Internet filter that most repulses and annoys me.

An Internet filter doesn’t just fall outside the executive purview of Government, it isn’t just vulnerable to all kinds of abuse, it doesn’t just fly in the face of expert opinion and civilian demand—it goes beyond those grievances and seeks to institutionalise a moral standard.

Not to reign in the swindle prematurely, but we already have institutions bearing the mantle of moral authority. They’re called churches. Remember?

Organised moral standards are traditionally the strict domain of faith. Meanwhile, we have this cornerstone democratic principle that we refer to as ‘the notion of secularity’. There is a reason we place such value in a secular Government: It’s simply impossible to represent competing moral imperatives, yet for any one moral representation by our governing body to be valid, all opposing ideologies would have to be represented.

There is no alternative—doing any less strays into the dangerous territory of discrimination and marginalisation.

That’s where we are now.

But there is a solution—to Internet filtering, to censorship, to that murky separation-of powers debate. It is not simply a change in Government, or successfully overturning this specific proposal. It is steeped in more systemic change, in establishing safeguards that will protect citizens against any future threat to our fundamental personal liberties and civil rights.

The key to preventing this sort of political haemorrhage in the future is to ratify a Bill of Rights in Australia. A Bill of Rights would enshrine fundamental human rights in legislation, making them enforceable by law.

It’s a very simple answer, and it’s one we need to spend our time passing on, rather than perpetuating the panic and conspiracy linked to select matters of censorship and Governmental nannying.

Hit back. Contact your local MP about the Internet filter, and join and support campaigns for a Bill of Rights in Australia.

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