Dear Stephen Conroy, here's why you're wrong:
Censorship is a means to an end, not an end itself. It needs to have a purpose, a well-defined goal that it's capable of actually achieving, otherwise it's just an arbitrary restriction we can do without, permanently open to abuse.
When I read your extraordinarily angry little spray submitted in time for Crikey's Christmas shutdown, and your statement when you released your censorship policy in December, and virtually any of the other things you've said about this subject over the last two years, one thing has been very clear: For this Government, right now, censorship is the end itself.
Now, some of us expect a little bit more than that. We expect to see some kind of vision, a statement or commentary on what kind of society the Government thinks we're going to be living in. We expect some effort to be made to persuade us that the vision is one worth striving for, and that the society the Government has in mind is the one which matches our own personal ideals. And, most importantly in this context, we expect open discussion about the role censorship is supposed to play in that vision.
That's your job: You're supposed to be the Government's mouthpiece, laying out the path that the Government wants to follow to make society better, and using your leadership skills to beckon everyone else to follow and contribute.
Generally when a complete stranger tries to tell you what your job is, that's a pretty good sign that you haven't been doing it.
Filling the leadership vacuum you've created, I've tried to do that part of your job for you: Nearly a year ago I took up the subject of your "Civil and confident society" meme in an article on ABC Unleashed, and explained why what you want to do is incompatible with my outlook on what civility and confidence looks like. I don't think I'm alone in harbouring those beliefs, and perhaps it's reasonable to expect some kind of open discussion about the directions we're taking.
If there was any reaction at all from you it was that you stopped talking about "Civil and confident societies." You show no leadership in this debate, you only ever stick with the safe ground, far easier to chant, "Child pornography. Bestiality. Child pornography. Bestiality," until everyone's eyes glaze over than it is to engage debate on a subject where there's a requirement for some kind of meeting of the minds.
There have been a lot of statements of vision coming from my side. They're fragmented, some are being expressed by people who aren't au fait with how politics works, but you can't deny that there's a grass-roots backlash to your policy in the works.
Although activists will probably fix the organizational problems, we both know that this issue probably won't swing the next election. But you know how Australian political cycles work: In two or three elections hence, there'll be a nail-bitingly close one where the electorate is getting sick of you, and you'll be able to sit quietly in the corner and wonder if you could have eked out a few thousand extra votes if only you hadn't treated 22 million internet users like garbage, wondering if this issue forms part of the difference between a 4-term or 3-term ALP Government.
This Government is the Internet's equivalent of a global-warming denier. There's something big happening, something momentous that we don't understand, and you and your colleagues are standing there with your fingers in your ears saying, "I'm not listening!" while the waters rise around your ankles, insisting that we're going to keep doing things the old way.
Your frankly ridiculous insistence on using Refused Classification as a baseline for your smutty little list is part of that.
Australia is unique in the world in having such a classification. In any other place, content is split into "legal" and "illegal," and the classifiers deal with the legal bits and the police deal with the illegal bits.
In Australia, however, we still have, "legal," and, "illegal," categories like everyone else, but we have a third category which I could call, "legal but we'd really like you to think it's illegal": Content which law enforcement isn't particularly interested in regulating, and which adults can enjoy in the comfort of their own homes without breaking any laws.
The moralizing lunatic fringe absolutely wets the bed in terror over this stuff, it's extraordinary. And everything they don't like gets shoved into it: Abortion, voluntary euthanasia, computer games, controversial cinematic releases like Salo and Baise-Moi which citizens of other civil and confident societies get to watch, enjoy and debate. Margaret Pomeranz has some interesting things to say about it, if only you'd listen.
We saw this during the Bill Henson controversy: Your Prime Minister couldn't get out of his own way quickly enough, channelling Helen Lovejoy as he declared the photos to be "absolutely revolting," as if the Prime Minister's opinion was even remotely relevant. What was the very first thing the lunatic fringe did? Exactly the same thing they always do when something they don't like appears in public: They went running off to the Classification Board to try to use it as a political tool by having them declare the content they didn't like as "Refused Classification." (Result: "PG". Score one for the good guys)
Despite your repeated insistence that "the Government does not intend to block political content," your own answers to Questions on Notice from Senator Scott Ludlam demonstrate that you know full well that it does -- Unless you're the kind of denialist who proves his own correctness by changing all the definitions, and you expect us to believe that voluntary euthanasia information and anti-abortion propaganda you'll be knowingly banning don't count as legitimate political expression.
(hint: In a free society, the Government doesn't get to define what "legitimate political expression" looks like -- Even if you think it's bad, wrong or fattening)
The rules governing Australia's media censorship system were decided 30 years ago, before most of the people they affect reached voting age, before a good many of them were even born. They certainly predated the Internet's arrival in Australia, and they've been creaking under the strain ever since.
The Internet has given Australians virtually unfettered access to RC for about two decades -- an entire generation has been brought up in its presence -- and one lesson I can draw from that is that the fretting, tut-tutting megaphone minority who brim forth with reasons to ban RC have all been completely wrong.
Access to this content has never been easier. If they had been right, that'd mean by now Australia would be some kind of moral vacuum, with people screwing in the streets, raping each other for breakfast, killing babies, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together ... mass hysteria!
But I don't see any of that. I see a completely normal society, civil and confident, peacefully going about its business with most people striving hard to make it even better. Despite ubiquitous availability, most people don't ever see anything RC and mostly aren't interested in it. The access to RC provided by the Internet doesn't appear to have caused any perceptible harm to anything at all.
So why is Australia unique in the world in restricting it? What purpose are the bans serving?
Which gets us back to where we started: Censorship is supposed to be a means to an end. You should elucidate some kind of vision that's compatible with society's norms, wants and desires, point out where you must censor in order to achieve that vision, and then proceed forth, objectively evaluating the censorship to make sure its results are compatible with the vision.
And you're not doing any of that.
If you had any vision, and if your Government was prepared to show any leadership, we wouldn't be having the debate we're having now. Instead, we'd be having a wider debate about how content is regulated in Australia and whether it's an appropriate match to a 21st century polity. You'd be asking whether ACMA's demonstrably incompetent content regulation activities are worth supporting, and inviting debate into whether we need their interference in a world where there's a virtually limitless supply of other channels you can select if the one you're listening to says something you don't like. And you'd be asking, "How might a future unknowable Government abuse a censorship facility built-in to every ISP in the nation?"
If you had any vision, and if your Government was prepared to show any leadership, you would be observing that no other nation in the world has a "Refused Classification," category, and you'd be inviting public debate into the appropriateness of stretching that broken, tired, abused and corrupted concept over new media in precisely the way you voted against in 1999.
But we don't get any of that. Instead we get imposition of an internet censorship system you know won't work, over a population who doesn't want it, with no explanation of why, and as an end unto itself rather than as a means to the achievement of a "civil and confident society."
Dysfunctional, meaningless, intellectually bankrupt policy propagated by a team of empty suits. Sir Humphrey Appleby would be proud of the lot of you.
Finally:
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they attack you, then you win."
You've been ridiculing anti-censorship campaigners for the best part of two years (ABC News: "If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree." Par for the course from you, Sir. And about that opt-out you mentioned...)
In late December you switched to "attacking" and called out your critics by name. Rather than addressing their points, you've resorted to straw man attacks and spiteful ad hominem jabs at their integrity.
Bernard Keane, Colin Jacobs, Stilgherrian and Asher Moses are big enough and ugly enough to defend themselves, but one of your attacks happened to feature something I have personal knowledge about: Asher Moses' story from October 2008 about overtures from your Senior Political Advisor, Belinda Dennett, to get Internode to make me pull my head in.
I'd suggest that you go through your departmental email archive and search for a message from Belinda Dennett to IIA board member Carolyn Dalton dated 21 October 2008 subject line "IIA Member Comment [SEC=IN-CONFIDENCE]". And if you don't, I'm sure someone with an FOI application form will.
That email, which Dalton claimed was accompanied by a phone call from Dennett, referred to a post I'd made on Whirlpool, where I quoted a section from a letter I'd sent to my local MP on the previous day which pointed out that if the Government stuffs a blacklist full of child porn URLs when it knows the blacklist will leak, then that Government will be complicit in the distribution of child porn when the inevitable happens. The email went on to express Dennett's "serious concern that a IIA Member would be sending out this sort of message."
(An IIA member wasn't. I was. And even if IIA was, you ought to be ashamed of yourself for expecting them kow-tow to the Government, presuming to tell them what kind of messages they can and can't convey. How dare you, Sir!)
As agreed in the phone call, the IIA forwarded the email to my employer. Ponder that for a moment, Senator: You, an ex-Trade Union headkicker, applying pressure to a boss to silence the political expression of a worker. How does that sit with your vision for society? Cognitive dissonance, much?
I found it quite intimidating at the time, and recall having to take a break and go for a walk for half an hour to clear my spinning head. I met my partner for a bite of lunch while I was out, and to this day I can't remember a single thing about what we discussed. It's not every day that a voter gets an angry missive from a Minister of the Crown expecting some kind of unstated employment sanctions arising from political points made in a letter to his MP.
It's clear from your reaction that I scored a direct hit.
The email was taken seriously by the recipients at the time: What followed was a conversation between me, IIA representatives and Internode management, which eventually resulted in an article by Simon Hackett penned for Business Spectator which asserted that Internode employees have always been able to actively and independently participate in public debates, and as long as we make it clear that we're not speaking on the company's behalf the company isn't going to get in our way.
Simon didn't need to write that article -- he could have dealt with the whole thing privately. Instead he took it public, with class and intelligence, and demonstrated again why the company that employs me is such a unique, wondrous and inspiring place to work. I'm convinced that there's no other company like it in Australia, and it's an honour and a privilege to be part of it.
So here we are a year later, and in your sniping, snarling, petulant little spray you're denying it all happened.
I have the emails, Sir. I haven't released them because my personal ethical code advises me that the participants in that discussion other than Ms. Dennett don't need the headache, don't need the controversy, don't need an angry, bombastic political toe-cutter launching personal attacks against them. And anyway, until you resurrected the issue and made it all current again it was ancient history and best forgotten.
But I still have them. And when you claim in December 2009 that the events of October 2008 "simply did not happen," I know that you, Sir, are are less than half the man that an occupant of the front bench ought to be.
Mark Newton, 24 December 2009, @NewtonMark