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