Illiberal chant:
Are we men?
Nay, we are but
conservatives

Stop the world, they want to get off!
Harold Hark
11 October 2002

The conservative, right wing governments currently dominating the world are leading their citizens inexorably towards an Orwellian era of conformity purified from all dissent.

Here in Australia, John Howard's "Government For the Few" have already passed internet censorship laws. The Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online services) Bill 1999 was seen by everyone in IT as the risible attempt of a government who wants to stop the world and get off.

Some also saw it as a foot in the door of total censorship.

These mugs may be unevolved, but they aren't stupid. Government spending on higher education has dropped 18 per cent since 1993, and diminished big time since March, 1996. The reason is simple. These throwbacks want a dumb, malleable population, that can be herded in any direction with the merest of patriotic sound bites.

So the Online Services bill was a precursor to the Border Protection Policy. Perhaps it should have been dubbed Reality Protection.

Now they are tampering with the Freedom of Information act.

Admittedly, FoI is a joke. As it currently reads, to pursue items relating to the free flow of information in a democracy requires years of bureaucratic hurdles and upwards of millions of dollars in legalised bribes to get the bureaucrats off their obstructive arses. And even then the pursuant may be stopped dead because of commercial in confidence stipulations or some other Machiavellian trick.

In June 2002, Richard "Frankenstein" Alston, the Minister for Communications and Information Technology who had just got hip to the spam plague, tabled amendments to the FoI Act to exempt information relating to web sites banned under their 1999 Internet censorship regime. Electronic Frontiers Australia have since failed in their attempt to force the Administrative Appeals Tribunal to release the list for public consumption. According to the Government, Refused Classification website material, including child pornography, is not in the public interest. EFA chairman Kimberly Heitman says, "If the Government doesn't say what it's censoring, we'll never know."

In other words, secrecy rules.

Secrecy, along with efficiency, are two of totalitarianism's primary ideals.

But it doesn't stop there. NSW Labor Police Minister, Michael Costa, wants to ban all websites protesting against November's World Trade Organisation meeting in Sydney's posh Double Bay suburb (wouldn't you know). Specifically, he wants to take down any sites that call for violent disruption of the WTO. With the above changes to FoI, no one will ever know what exactly happened to them beyond the fact that they are no longer there.

A beeg problem for the Government emerges from all this: There are some 28,000 anti-WTO or related sites and those few that are successfully taken down will simply pop up elsewhere. People on their mailing lists will be informed instantly of the new address and ... voilà, it will be anti-business as usual.

Meanwhile, it will be a hop, skip and jump for the Government to stretch out and start banning sites like the one your reading right now. When SOHO sites like SCATT are pulled, they stay pulled. Excuses like "the national interest", the "war on terrorism", "he's not a very nice man", "the Queen wouldn't approve", and so forth will simply prompt the removal. Service Providers will be forced to fall in line. You don't mess with totalitarians.

Still, unless the Internet is drastically curtailed in some (currently impossible) way, it would appear that the forces of evil are going to have to spend enormous sums of money and devote molto man hours of time in order to fail in their attempt to bring down freedom of expression. By the time they get to the stage where such repression is possible, the world may have already turned on them. Because, really, all they have going is the ability to con people into believing that being a small, mean, pinch-hearted, fearful knuckle dragger is better than being alive.

Sooner or later, even the dumbest cluck knows this is a recipe for cancer.

Related articles:

•  Simon Hayes: Secret web bans in FOI changes
•  Nathan Cochrane: Spooked, and trading on fear

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