Page 4332 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 22 September 2010
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The government is overplaying the threat that the internet poses in its current form to people who have little understanding of what the internet does and then it is offering to protect them from it. This is in the long tradition of political populism—taking a complex issue, blowing it out of proportion and offering a simple solution. It is possibly good politics but it is certainly not good policy.
Censorship is an age-old problem. What do we censor? What is offensive? One person can take offence when another does not. Remember last year when we had a big debate about the photographs by Bill Henson? He has subsequently been rehabilitated and his art has been now described as art again.
One of the things the Greens are strongly in favour of, and that I hope everyone in this house is in favour of, is democracy, open debate and free speech. Without open debate, we do not have democracy. We are left with a dictatorship of some form. There is always a tension between censorship and open public debate. People should be free to express opinions, even if those opinions are unpopular, critical of the government of the day, question certain religious or political beliefs or raise uncomfortable questions. We must strive to keep the range of ideas that can be expressed in public life as broad as possible.
However, I do recognise that at some point the expression of certain ideas and the distribution of certain materials is damaging, or can be damaging, to our society. Personally, I think the expression of racial hatred is one place where drawing the line is appropriate. So is religious vilification and producing or consuming child pornography.
I believe that the challenge for all of us, and certainly the challenge for internet provision, is to censor as little as possible so as to protect our democratic freedoms, while censoring enough to protect the members of our community who would be vulnerable otherwise. Censoring the internet that comes into Australia is a slippery slope, especially when the agency which will be charged with it, ACMA, has no experience in doing it, no guidelines for how to do it and no supervision.
We do not know what we are not allowed to see and why we are not allowed to see it. We will not be able to challenge the decision of whoever it is that makes these decisions for us. The process will be secret and the censorship, which is not transparent, is a real threat to democracy. Right now I have to say that we are totally confident the government will not use censorship as a political tool. There are other countries in the world where this does happen. Unfortunately, this may not be the case in the future.
In terms of protecting children from inappropriate content, the technology is already out there to do that. The Howard government spent over $80 million on a program to provide free content filters to families to protect their children from unwanted content. These filters when installed on a family’s computers work effectively and enable parents to finetune what their kids can and cannot access. We think that was a good and appropriate move.
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