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Your voters need a clear statement of what you will do.

Conroy’s delay means nothing. It is overly cynical and pathetic.

I will not vote for a party that wants to bring in blanket censorship.

This is not good Labor policy.

There are many better options to fight back against child pornography. Police resources would be a good start.

LABOR, please stop the crap, DROP the whole failed filter idea and LISTEN to the VOTERS before it is too late.

The filter is heavily backed by the evangelists, who themselves say, once implemented they will lobby hard for a much wider scope.
Conroy, what part of “we don’t want your useless filter in any shape or form” and “it just will not work” don’t you understand?
I will be voting for ‘anyone’ but Labor come the election, this is too important to both the reputation abroad and constitutional freedom of speech in Australia.

I have been a Labor supporter for 35 years but sadly, I can no longer support them.

If Abbot gets into office, I will hold Rudd and Conroy personally responsible for failing to LISTEN to the electorate. A politician is our servant not our master and Conroy and Rudd need to remember this.

Richard, you have picked a significant weakness in the notion the scope of an RC based filter is limited. The three terrorism, offensive portrayal of under 18s and offensive portrayal of other material tests of RC are to some extent bounded (though the ‘reasonable person’ test in the latter two is problematic, see recent criticism based on claimed changed sophistication of audiences).

However, the fourth test, ‘promote, incite or instruct in matters of crime or violence’, is more open-ended. Critical comment about the legal status of any act as a criminal offence could, at worst, be seen to ‘promote’ that offence.

For instance, the euthanasia example was well covered in the show. Thoughtful parliamentarians have debated moves to decriminalise assisted euthanasia for the last decade, on both sides, in many states and territories. The closer a statement comes to open advocacy of self help in this area, or cooperation with others, the more that a cautious ACMA officer might identify it as ‘promotion’ of crime.

New crimes, including cybercrimes, are also of course being created all the time. The new cyber-bullying offences, announced in the last few days, might be interesting. If they are too widely cast, as many of the more draconian recent offences are, online criticisms encouraging not following them to the letter may lurch into this ‘promotion’ zone.

On the tests themselves, while these are not easy to change due to the states’ role, it is also clear that the RC classification is ultimately just a list of different categories, differently constructed, and thus subject to change any time there is political will across the jurisdictions to add another category or expand an existing one, such as you might see in a moral panic

NB: The other side of the RC scope problem (RC is in fact tiny at present) was however not noticed. As with all the classifications, Refused Classification means only a specific item that has actually been refused classification – it is, in the context of the global net, a tiny number, apparently in the hundreds or low thousands. The term ‘RC’ does not cover all the vastly larger group of similar online content which would fail an RC test if it were ever classified; yet it is this very large number which I think most people would be thinking of when they think ‘RC’. All of the millions or billions of items which might offend one of these 4 tests, among the trillion on the net, are not RC until they have been complained of, processed and classified. So anyone hoping that say all child porn would be covered would be disappointed – only that very small list of accessible and somewhat stable sites (or individual pages, if Senator Conroy is to be believed now) which have been complained of, identified, assessed and been through the ACMA review and perhaps Classification Board consideration will be Refused.

The rest of the ‘potentially RC’ material, presumably the vast bulk of material that would if assessed fail an RC test, will never be assessed or classified unless it too goes through this process, which it will not. For cost, time and resource reasons there is no plan to actually classify the whole net, as this would be an impossible task to do properly; the only path to failing an RC test is apparently via individual complaint, or appearance on a list imported from eg a child porn tracker like Internet Watch Foundation in UK, or perhaps Interpol – though, as these latter lists would miss all the non-child porn material, since most countries only focus on child porn, no-one else bothers with our RC list beyond that.

An RC list would also presumably miss the serious criminalised stuff, including child porn, circulated through organised transient fast-flux botnet insertion into innocent web hosts. And also all the rest of the bad stuff, probably the majority of it, circulated other than by the open Web.

So, the RC category for online material has problems with both its expansiveness (‘promotion of crime’ can be very broad), and its inadequate minimalism (virtually nothing is actually covered).

If anything, the filter got scarier for me as a result of the show. As someone who grew up in Joh’s Queensland, I have vivid memories of his terrible anti-street march legislation, which criminalised meetings on the street of more than 3 people. Watching the show, it hit me like a brick betweeen the eyes – a website proposing civil disobedience to such a law would be deemed as promoting the doing of a criminal act and therefore prohibited content under Conroy’s plan. Conroy’s law will be the next Joh’s best friend!

How can this be the Labor party doing this terrible and stupid thing????

Along with ETS, Insulation, Childcare, Solar heating reversals we are also getting the filter delayed until after the next election.

Plenty of time to vote all members of the Right Wing Labor party out of office and put this to bed properly.

Unlike the last election where the filter was effectively hidden, this time we know what is planned.

- Multinational corporations
- Foreign Governments (including our allies)

Here’s who the Government will listen to:

- Jim Wallace

So where exactly do the Australian people fit in there Senator?

Justin.

See Mark’s reply to Warwick above. It’s unlikely that there are 355 known CP sites on the list, probably more like 0. RC doesn’t really have a CP category, it’s child depiction and is far broader.

- Justin