I sometimes think that if it weren’t for the Senate Estimates Committees we would hardly know anything about our government at all in this country that didn’t come from a press release or a well-timed leak, given that Question Time has largely become a farce. I imagine that the senior public servants and Government Ministers who get grilled don’t enjoy them much though.
The Senators are currently uncovering undisclosed, or at least unpublicised, aspects to many government programs. Of course, the heady whiff of grandstanding is undeniable, but that doesn’t mean that the questions asked are necessarily discredited entirely because they are informed by a partisan agenda. The scrutiny also offers the chance to show how certain plans may be unbalanced in the composition of their beneficiaries or unreliable in delivering the promised benefits at all.
One plan which appears to be unbalanced in its beneficiaries is the Murray-Darling re-adjustment plan: all the money to go to irrigators, none to the towns affected by the flight of farming families?
There is a great deal of concern from Liberal Senators about the economic stimulus package and the unrestricted bank deposits guarantee, and through the committees we discover that there was no formal modelling of the stimulus package, and that there may have not been full consultation with all the regulatory bodies before the plan was announced.
Finally, the plan which appears to not only be unbalanced in its proposed beneficiaries but also questionable about offering benefits at all, while penalising broad swathes of the population at the same time: the Government’s proposed internet filtering plan. There’s much concern for the financial implications (due to immense slowing of access speeds) as well as the freedom implications of the plan, let alone it’s questionable effectiveness.
Questioning in committee by Scott Ludlam of the Greens [transcript] has revealed that Senator Conroy’s plan has not set target parameters for overblocking and underblocking benchmarks (does he even know what they are?) to evaluate the effectiveness of the filtering software, let alone acceptable/unaccaptable benchmarks for slowed access speeds. The promise that Australians would be able to opt out was apparently non-core, too – Conroy confirmed he’s planning a two-tier system, and only one is opt-out. He also has no answer for how his plan is incapable of filtering peer-to-peer networks (60% of file-sharing on the internet is via P2P). Lauredhel has more at Hoyden About Town, and The Age today reports instances of Senator Conroy’s office allegedly attempting to suppress dissenting opinions from ISPs, experts and private individuals.
Conroy’s answer to nearly any objection that points out that the only effective outcome of his plan will be slower internet speeds for everybody, including businesses and public services, appears to be to accuse the objectors of aiding paedophiles (who will all be merrily avoiding the filters via P2P anyway).
More information than you can shake a stick at regarding objections to the internet filtering plan can be found at nocleanfeed.com
Kiddie porn is, by all reports, unsurprisingly, not distributed via publicly-accessible websites.
Web censorship is completely irrelevant to the question of kiddie porn, given that the net result will not be the blocking of the site, but the laying of criminal charges against both the owners of the site (if possible) and those who frequent it.
Paedophilia is a red herring here, and Senator Conroy should know better.
This is all the fault of the dopes in the Victorian ALP whose preference deal ensured Steve Fielding’s election on 2% of the primary vote in 2004. Pandering to him is what this is all about.
On the brighter side it’s possible that Conroy may be happy to put forward a totally impractical scheme to keep Fielding happy, getting it voted down in the Senate by an alliance of the Greens and the Libs.
Derrida, I can only hope that it is a stunt intended to fail, because for me the alternative is to believe that Senator Conroy is horrendously ignorant of how the Internet works, extremely poorly advised, or maybe he and the government just hold us in contempt. Talk about a nanny state…
The only intent behind this plan that makes sense to me is broad censorship of the general populace, because – as noted by RM and other commentators – purported targets and technically adept users have a plethora of means of avoiding the filters: P2P networks and TOR to name just a couple. The end result is everyone suffers through degradation of their service, access costs rise as ISPs are forced to provision more hardware to compensate for the performance impact of the filters, and the “targets” continue with business as usual.
Maybe if you try to access a blocked site you’ll get redirected to an animation of Kevvie waving his finger, naughty boy style. As predicted by some, he does seem to be the type.
There has not been an Australian government yet that has shown it actually understands how the Internet works.
This seems to be a very wide ranging thread starter, I’m gonna take the risk of picking up on Conroy’s form as
party hack operatorbeing more part of the problem than a solution. Have you ever listened to Conroy speak? Never has there been a greater plodder, it’s painful. If it’s any indication of the non-mecuriality of his mind, he’s a bad match for this portfolio.I see from his bio he was put in as a consultant for Barry Jones, back in the mid 80’s when His Venerable Boffinship was enagaged in futile, ultimately accurate, prophesy as to what the deep currents in economy-driving sectors were going to be . Conroy doesn’t get a mention in BOJ’s tome of a biography, he wasn’t there long, and obviously didn’t learn much, what a waste. If only they’d put someone with the aptitude to soak it all up for the future. In retrospect they should have drafted Kev from Goss’s failed Queensland knee’s-up.
Except maybe he had a different job to do for Teh Party. Barry’s National Technology Strategy vision, (of 84, but which sits presciently well with 2020 stuff) was a threat to Button’s Unionist brief to get motor manufacturing, iron and steel, textiles and clothing on life support, so Baz had to be knobbled. Thus Conroy, who also worked for Button, and came from the Metal Trades Industry Association just previous? This is how bad : BOJ was invited to deliver a keynote address at the G-7 Science Minister’s summit (only time Australia had been invited to attend a g7 summit) on “Policies for Promoting Promising Technologies and Industries”. Hawke’s office told him he wasn’t allowed to go, he’d have to take leave and pay his own way. Which he did. That’s when we dropped the 21st century economy ball. And now we have the rocket scientists, not, like Carr and Conroy in the portfolios to drag us into the 21st century?
derrida derider wrote:
Fielding is a chump, but the ALP have been banging on about craptastic internet filters for years in opposition. It can only backfire – the real internet nasties are already hard enough to catch due to the aforementioned things like TOR and filtering will simply push them further underground.
Explaining this to politicians is impossible. If they had any brains, they’d simply run a totally fake piece of legislation through the parliament that says “we’re watching” and then do absolutely nothing. That would be more effective than trying to hammer a social issue with technology which always fails.
I know this is slightly off-topic, but since we’re discussing lackwit Ministers, Marn Fersn has been strangely silent lately.
Couldn’t we just let the contract out to
the PLAwhoever does the Great Firewall of China? We’re in the real-time workforce logistics timezone so that should’t be a problem. It’s not like they don’t know their way around already , especially DFAT, if they wanted to:Asia Netcom is a wholly owned subsidiary of (Chinese Government owned ) China Netcom Yep, China pwns Oz at the backend, from way back in Dolly DFAT days.
If the Chinese Government/Netcom do the router provsioning, and have (Cisco assisted) world best(?) practice at telling red packets from blue packets, aren’t they best suited for our packet-sniffing’r'us jobs? They showed they are up to the task at the Olympics, and we wouldn’t have repeatedly given them the DFAT contract if they weren’t trustworthy. Put them 1,000 Chinese spies here to work say I.
dj @ 4 – surprisingly this is a case where the liberal party policy has been much better – eg. filtering on the client side for those who really want it without affecting those who don’t.
If Dan is accurate, then even when it’s free the vast majority of people don’t actually want a filter on their internet connection. This suggests to me that the issue(s) this filter is meant to address exist in the imagination of politicians, the MSM, and a very small and vocal minority.
Heres a deal for them, they will have my full undivided support for the internet filter AFTER they design and implement a 100% effective spam email filter. Without in any way stuffing up emails from people I want, or slowing down my access.
Setting the bar at that low level should cure them of any illusions of adequacy they may be harboring on technical issues.
Why cannot people just be honest about the Darling Murray?
The words are “evil”, “psychopaths” and “”corruption”. Here’s another forbidden word relating to the Russ Hinze of his generation; “Bill Ludwig”. Given the hatred for Mother Environment of the crass, arrogant, barren minded and soul deficient cretins who run things. And Rudd and the Roosters like Abetz and Tuckey, and Alan Wood and Miranda Devine in the media, all seem to be of this culture. NO hope for generations of future world citizens.
No, instead we get micro-managment by the same micro minds; filtering the naughty bits off people’s computers while the world at large looks on, starving.
The senate estimates would indeed remain a fertile opportunity for political reporting except that it appears in the process, like everything else with the media and press, of being usurped by tabloidism both in the presentation and politics.
Crested one, thanks for raising these issues.
Re: Scrutiny in the Senate: while youse all bewail and/or celebrate the excesses/deficiencies of the operation of the upper house, please spare a thought for us Queenslanders – we don’t even have one.
Thus there was no opportunity for parliamentary review of the blatant miscarriage of every principle except avarice in 1) turning the so-called water market here into a pirate’s paradise, where whoever has the biggest pumps and bulldozers wins 2) Legitimising the piracy by giving the pirates post facto legal ability to sell back the booty to the rightful owner, the Commonwealth of the Murray-Darling. The fact that an ex-qld labor treasurer is chair of the biggest pirate will have nothing whatsoever to do with the gov’t decision that allows it.
See last Monday’s 4 corners videos, the penny wong interview.
It’s probably needless to say but, if qld did have a Senate to scrutiny with, with proper proportional representation, The Others would have the numbers, 52/47, if necessary, not counting the FNQ
The UndeadOne Nation one. It must be the heat.When the Howard government got that overwhelming majority in the senate a few years ago, the ABC reported that Senate Estimates committees would become a thing of the past. As TT said, they’re a conduit for public information that otherwise would stay in obscurity. I was hugely worried, and so glad that that the demise of the Estimates committees seems to have been greatly exaggerated.
This was one of Beazley’s brain dead policies designed to appeal to conservative voters. It’s a crap idea that’s going to make the internet worse for everyone without actually tackling the problem. I support more resources for capturing child pornographers, but crippling the internet’s not the way to go about it.