An Open Letter to Senator Stephen Conroy and the Australian Labor Party
Dear Mr. Conroy,
I see from your recent announcement that you and the Labor Party are still determined to go ahead with installing national Internet filters. As an Australian writer, I cannot stress how strongly opposed I am to this measure. Whatever your good intentions for filtering child pornography – and I give you and the Party the benefit of the doubt here – once such a mechanism is in place, the possibility of abuse by this government or future governments is unacceptable.
Please do not respond with assurances. You cannot predict what this government may choose to censor in the future. You certainly have no control over what future governments may choose to censor and for what purposes. The mere existence of such a mechanism will provide the temptation as well as the means. The lack of transparency of the blacklist (which can always be manipulated) will mean Australians can no longer trust their government not to be hiding information from them. Australia is one of the finest democracies on the planet, but with this filter in place, we will never be able to speak out against political or ideological censorship again. We will be no better than China and we will be far worse than any other Western democracy.
Whatever your motives for censoring the Internet – and let’s hope and pray they are good – a mandatory filter is the wrong solution. Whatever you intend to use it for, you will have created the potential for serious abuse. Whatever your beliefs about the moral integrity of future Australian governments, while such a filter exists there will always be the suspicion – because there will always be the possibility – that it is being abused for political or ideological ends.
I am a lifelong supporter of the labour movement and come from a poor, working class background. There are few things a Labor government could do to change the way I vote. Censoring the Internet with mandatory filtering would be one of them. I would swap my vote immediately to any party that would promise to scrap it and that might stand a chance of achieving power. That is because such a filter strikes at the very heart of democracy and puts everything I believe in at risk.
Regards,
Graham Storrs.
