Some idea of the way it’s stirred the pigeons can be gleaned from the reaction reported in New Matilda.

Elsewhere: Tim Dunlop.

NB: Previous discussion on LP can be found here.

…remove the provisions which would exempt any agreement between between Telstra and NBN Co from the provisions of the Competition and Consumer Act.

This means that should Telstra and NBN Co agree to disconnect or remove the internet from the coaxial cable network used to broadcast FoxTel the ACCC would be able to intervene on the grounds that was an attempt to limit competition.

The tactical games also encompass the Coalition introducing an “NBN transparency bill” which would require the Productivity Commission to do a cost-benefit analysis of the NBN. If the PC is honest, all this is likely to reveal is that while the costs can be predicted reasonably accurately, the estimated benefits depend on how much you believe in the “broadband as enabling technology” story.

Beyond the tactical games, though, the Coalition does appear to be sketching out something approximating an alternative vision for the Australian telecommunications industry. Martin’s report suggests that the Coalition seeks the “voluntary separation of Telstra into retail and wholesale arms” (rather than the gun-to-the-head approach that the government has used). The government would then impose a universal service obligation of 12 megabits per second broadband on the wholesale company, and would provide subsidies to achieve this in regional areas.

This is almost a reasonable alternative proposal if you don’t think a universal fibre rollout is justifiable at this point in time (as noted at length in past posts on the NBN, I’m not convinced that it is). Given Telstra’s history since privatization, however, why would we have any confidence that the company would voluntarily do anything other than exploit its monopoly power to the detriment of the rest of us, leaving the ACCC perpetually fighting the last battle?

If Turnbull proposed the enforced splitting of Telstra into two companies, with one owning the copper and coax networks, the other doing wireless and telco retailing, this might have been a workable proposal. Until that happens, it’s still a recipe for the forced and long-term transfer of money from the telecommunications users of Australia to Telstra’s shareholders.

But that’s perhaps by the by.

I think one of the most interesting things that came out of Q&A tonight was the way it made me think that the debate over the internet filter is thoroughly misframed, or rather it fails to engage altogether with the issues that underlie it.

Australian Sex Party President Fiona Patten was asked a very interesting question about the way that exposure to sexual content habituates people to a very instrumental view of sex, stripped of its intimate contexts and wrenched out of any sort of human relationship. Whether or not its representation is becoming more violent, I can’t say. But I do think that most of what we see under the guise of “adult content”, and its extenstion into the sexification of everything, has very little to do with:

(a) Mungo McCallum’s view that pr0n is something that people resort to in order to spice up their sex lives – he’s almost certainly completely wrong that it’s not something that people casually consume over their morning tea;

(b) Freedom of expression or civil libertarian arguments.

Stephen Conroy’s gesture, echoed by Sophie Mirabella, that adults can make their own informed choices harks back to some sort of older framing of the censorship debate. We might think of radical Italian cinema, or the Marquis De Sade, or the bowdlerisation of Greek texts, or Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The censorship battles of the 50s and early 60s were largely about a certain notion of high art, a culture of classical humanism opposed to one of wowserism. Similarly, the ‘free love’ aspects of the 60s sexual revolution had at least the aspiration of expanding human pleasure and obvious links to liberatory movements and impulses.

But we don’t live in that world today.

The nonsense that we’re bombarded with – day in, day out – and here Conroy was right about the ubiquity of it and the fact that it can’t be neatly confined to a “family space” to be filtered out – is something quite different, that doesn’t sit neatly into a liberal versus wowser frame. I’m not just talking about pr0n here but about the insanity of every single mag at the supermarket checkout queue screaming about bodies, bikinis and plastic surgery, and all sorts of other stuff. It’s the marketisation of the body, its commodification – what we’re talking about is the colonisation of the libidinal by capitalism.

There’s a neat circle, then, between social liberalism and economic liberalism, which show both up for what they are. I think we need to confront that before we start jumping up and down about “freedom” when what we actually mean in practice is the right of capital to impose particular body forms and modes of apprehending sex and relationships through relentless repetition.

At the same time, the individualisation of social relationships makes them much more disposable, makes sex much more of an object of assessment and judgement rather than an expression of love. Not that I want to argue that there’s some sort of pristine act of love being deformed, but I think it is incontestable that sex is more and more thought of in a very decontextualised way, even within relationships.

What is to be done?

I don’t know, but I think we need to start talking about commodified sexual culture as it is, not in terms which were set in a very different social formation.

[Just to be clear, I'm not making a pro-filter argument. I am saying a lot of the affect that underpins it comes from elsewhere than the reasons articulated for and against, and that we're missing something very serious if we think only in terms of liberties or the rights of adults.]

The story follows a report in today’s Fairfax papers that Kevin Rudd’s chief of staff, Alister Jordan, had been asked to take soundings among MPs on the Prime Minister’s behalf, and claims from The Australian that Julia Gillard had done herself and her party a dis-service by not initiating the challenge the paper had been talking up at yesterday’s caucus.

Update: There’s now a report on the ABC News website.

Update: The Twitter hashtag #spill is being revived… though #ruddroll also has its admirers.

Update: Kerry O’Brien says there’ll be more later on in the 7.30 Report. Meanwhile, the most astute summary on Twitter comes from RachWelsh who points out that some tweeting journos with sources are saying something is happening, and others are not.

Update: Heather Ewart on the 7.30 Report claimed that meetings were taking place between elements of the NSW and Victorian Right, and Mark Arbib is said to have defected from Rudd. She reported that Gillard is meeting with Rudd, but of course, Gillard may be meeting with Rudd to quash the unchallenge. Or not.

Update: Fairfax reports (at 7.39pm) that Gillard’s office has said “nothing has changed”.

Update: There’s very little news among all the noise. Bill Shorten is said to be one of those orchestrating the unchallenge, and the AWU has reportedly withdrawn its support for Rudd.

Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan, Anthony Albanese and John Faulkner are reported to be in Kevin Rudd’s office.

Gillard is reported to be not intending to challenge.

This micro-event, it would seem, has been brought to you by the genius “strategists” who talked Rudd into dropping the ETS in the first place, setting in train his plunge in the polls. The NSW Right, as I’ve said before, knows no other response to bad focus groups than to bring on a leadership challenge. Political courage and leadership is unknown among the apparatchiks and Sussex Street types.

And we’ve also had an unprecedented campaign against the PM from the media and the mining industry. While I’d like to see Gillard become PM, the Labor Party would be insane to dump Rudd now, and nor should they.

This will be highly damaging, coming as it does just at the point when it appeared that things could be turned around for the government. If I were Julia Gillard, I’d urge Rudd to convene a caucus meeting tomorrow morning, and personally move a confidence motion in his leadership. And heads should roll in the ALP. Soon.

Update: The Punch, which is live blogging what is still the unchallenge, reports that John Faulkner between Gillard and Rudd.

I’ll repeat what I said before: if the ALP dumps Rudd now, it will be the height of stupidity, and be a demonstration of nothing but craven cowardice in the face of a media/mining industry orchestrated campaign, at a time when the polls indicate, despite a low primary vote, the ALP is still odds on to win the election.

Update: Paul Howes has just Tweeted that he’ll be on Lateline to explain the AWU’s position.

Update: Rachel Hills says it all on Twitter:

I feel like much of the anti-Rudd sentiment recently is more journalists getting bored with him than a newfound excess of crapness. #spill

Update: The Drum editor Jonathan Green on Twitter:

a certain smugness in the media at this coup by commentariat

Update: Sky News is reporting Kevin Rudd will be giving a press conference in the next 5 to 10 minutes.

Update: Lots of Tweets claiming that Rudd is about to quit.

Update: Rudd’s press conference will be televised live on ABC1 very soon.

Update: Rudd has convened caucus to meet at 9am. Gillard will be challenging. He is not standing down.

Update: Rudd indicates he will be running against faction and union domination. He is also running against the NSW Right, indicating that if he wins he will not be retreating from the RSPT, or giving in to calls for a hardline on asylum seekers. He suggested forward movement on climate change.

Update: New thread here.

The ministerial press release points out the key features: Telstra will allow the NBN to use its infrastructure, and will gradually switch its customers from the existing copper fixed-line network to the NBN, most likely becoming the NBN’s biggest customer. Rather than directly selling the infrastructure, Telstra will lease it to the NBN; Telstra will also receive a cash payment for every customer it transfers from its copper network to the NBN.

An interesting, though relatively small part of the deal is the creation of a new, government owned company, “USO Co”, which will take over Telstra’s universal service obligations (for universal basic phone access, emergency numbers and so on). In terms of financial aspects, the foot has been taken off Telstra’s neck in mobiles, where the government has given up its threat to refuse Telstra the chance to bid for next generation mobile broadband spectrum.

So, after years of delay, cash gouging by Telstra, and argy-bargy, it seems that Australia’s fixed-line telecommunications industry will be something akin to what many (including me) have thought would be best – a monopoly, government-owned supplier of the natural monopoly bit – the cables to everyone’s house, and a free-for-all in the other bits, including retailing and the high-capacity cables linking exchanges and whatnot. Joshua Gans is disappointed that Telstra’s existing networks aren’t going to be competing against the NBN. I’m not; duplicating telecommunications infrastructure to the home makes about as much sense as running multiple competitors’ power or water networks to individual homes and businesses. As noted here (let’s not rehash that debate), I’m not sure that that connection to the premises actually must be fibre, but if we’re going down that road the only sensible thing to do is to shut everything else down.

And, yes, this does amount to buying (or leasing) back large parts of the infrastructure that the government sold not so long ago, as John Durie points out in the Oz. Thank you, John and Peter. Whatever other idiocies Stephen Conroy is determined to inflict on us in the name of the fundie vote, he, and the government more broadly, deserve the credit for finally unscrambling the egg.

That’s assuming that the deal can actually survive the next federal election, the ACCC, and Telstra’s shareholders…

Elsewhere: Paul Budde’s initial reaction and follow-up. He likes it too.

A spokeswoman for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said yesterday the legislation would not be introduced next month’s or the June sittings of parliament.

With parliament not sitting again until the last week of August, the laws are unlikely to be passed before the election.

Vote Green, Green, Green in the Senate, y’all. Then this ridiculous law won’t get passed after this next election either.

crossposted

The post, which appears below, was originally published here.

There are a range of good arguments against the Rudd government’s internet filter, some emphasised for persuasive or tactical reasons, some reflective of deeply held political and political positions. Among the latter, liberal and libertarian arguments tend to dominate. This is not necessarily to say that those advancing such arguments (which we might usefully summarise under the slogan ‘information wants to be free’) are liberals or libertarians in a consistently ideological sense, or on the political right. It’s more that the deep logic of the internet’s history produces an argument in terms of freedom, and that view seems natural to those who are passionate about the online world. In this article, I want to present a somewhat more sociological argument, and one that seeks to build on an alternative (though, in part, complementary) set of assumptions drawn from left and progressive thought and tradition.

In so doing, the target at which I want to aim is not the internet filter itself, or Stephen Conroy himself. To my mind, the personalisation of the debate has not been a helpful aspect of the campaign against the filter proposal. What I think is useful and important to understand is the underlying cause of the government’s move, which casts the argument around freedom in something of a different light.

What is at issue here is the desire to govern the private choices of individuals, a desire which has had its apogee in the communitarian aspects of New Labour governance in the United Kingdom. To adapt a judgement made by The Economist, thirteen years of New Labour government has seen the state grow, personal freedom greatly diminish, but the underlying social patterns of inequality little disturbed. The urge to shape and dictate private choices has been growing among Labor governments in Australia, with the long lived Bob Carr style state regimes leading the vanguard. Mark Latham tempered the communitarian rhetoric to a high flame during his leadership, and despite his repudiation by the ALP, the Rudd government has seemingly adopted a similar governing mentality, albeit at more of a simmer.

The causes of the desire to govern the soul are multiple, though interconnected and interwoven.

It’s no coincidence that an increasing drive to interfere with private decisions and choices accompanied the election of the first generation of centre-left governments after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation of the End of History. The ideological climate where social democrats lost any sense of the capacity to transform, and the desirability of transforming economic and social relations lent itself to a statism without long term purpose, a statism that manifests itself in interventions to transform private lives rather than to transform national and global society. Stripped of the power, and the will, to restructure economic life so as to negate deeply structural inequalities in a globalised world, purpose and the will to do good manifests itself into a micro-level of intervention; what Michel Foucault called ‘biopolitics’ – a politics of governing the individual body and soul.

Reflected through the prism of the constant campaign, the spectacle of the symbol in politics, and the 24/7 media cycle, ‘bite-sized’ policies have the capacity to substitute for social change over the long term and to feed the drumbeat of moral panic sounded on a repetitive and moment by moment time scale.

Secondly, in a risk society, individuals are less trusted to make choices for themselves, governed by their desires, their use of private reason, and their consciences. The sub-politics of risk, to invoke the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, concerns itself with the downside of modernity and complexity – the costs of the aggregation of private decisions to public finances and purposes. In areas like health, child development, and many others, the costs of perceived negative choices are transferred to a public purse unable to deal with them, and in a neo-liberal culture, the production of a docile and compliant workforce is key both to the legitimation of governance in a chaotic environment and to the reproduction of late capitalist patterns of work, consumption and distribution.

Thirdly, the micro-government of the individual is a key point of contestation at the site where democratisation and authority clash. An increasing climate of openness from the 1960s onwards, and the democratisation of culture among whose effects is a resistance to assertions of authority, later supplemented by the growth of populisms both right and left combined to render the notion that policy is an effect of expertise shaky. ‘Evidence-based policy’ is something of a backlash. With politics denuded of big picture ideological conflicts, the void is filled with hordes of experts, who with the best will in the world, think that they know what’s good for us. Labor governments, stripped of any real transformational purpose, obsessed with symbolic campaigning and feeding the media beast, and concerned about the governance of risk, seize upon (and cherry pick) crumbs from the table of thinktank, private and public research expertise.

So, then, the internet filter is part of a bigger picture. It’s one more item, among the alcopops tax, the national testing regime in schools, and many others, of a form of governmental mentality which seeks to shape, or to dictate, choices to citizens, who are presumed to be unable to discern their own best interests. Evidence, research and policy step in, and electoral advantage is sought through the intertwined machine of political communication and media dissemination.

Yet, there is another left tradition.

That is the tradition embodied in movements for popular education from the 19th century onwards, in the habits of auto-didacticism of early trade unionists and activists, of the respect for reason and informed conscience and judgement imparted to English speaking socialisms and Labourism from the dissent of chapel and the world of workplace dispute and argument. This tradition is one of the cultivation of the capacities of all citizens to apply reason to human affairs, to make conscientiously good decisions in their private lives through collective learning and civic conversation, for opportunity to be opened up rather than to be circumscribed.

This fundamentally progressive attitude and set of dispositions seeks to expand the capabilities of ordinary folk and to enable and facilitate citizens’ desires for autonomy, self-government and collective government of communal and state institutions.

It’s part of a sweeping movement of democratisation, which popped up in another context at the height of the administered society in the 1950s and 1960s, in a desire for participatory decision-making and for individuals together to question the force of ingrained social norms. It’s part of an activist culture manifested in social movements such as feminism and other liberatory and transformational currents. At its heart, it represents a fundamental optimism, a philosophical anthropology foundational to left politics (and to liberalism, too) which holds that humans are thinking beings able to be trusted with choice, and whose choices deserve a basic level of respect.

The internet, as I alluded to at the outset, is part of that secular movement towards the democratisation of social relations; and of knowledge. It’s precisely because the internet affords so much promise for those who wish to decide their destinies in common, to learn, to form an informed judgement and habit of thought that its freedom from state interference is so important at the level of principle. I’m not so interested in the particulars of the reasons advanced by the Rudd government for this latest instance of the desire to micro-manage individual choices. I’m much more interested in opposing, in principle, anything that partakes in the disrespect for the capacities of individual citizens to decide severally and collectively how best to regulate their own lives. That’s a principle, in my view, that from a left and progressive position, is well worth fighting for.

Google, which has recently been involved in a censorship spat with China, has been one of the filtering policy’s harshest critics. It has identified a range of politically sensitive and innocuous material, such as sexual health discussions and discussions on euthanasia, which could be blocked by the filters.

Last week, it said it had held discussions with users and parents around Australia and “the strong view from parents was that the government’s proposal goes too far and would take away their freedom of choice around what information they and their children can access”.

Google also said implementing mandatory filtering across Australia’s millions of internet users could “negatively impact user access speeds”, while filtering material from high-volume sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter “appears not to be technologically possible as it would have such a serious impact on internet access”.

“We have a number of other concerns, including that filtering may give a false sense of security to parents, it could damage Australia’s international reputation and it can be easily circumvented,” Google wrote.

Conroy, unsurprisingly, instead of defending his policy against these criticisms simply attacks Google for uttering them.

630 comments, most of them calling him a dill, 96% opposition on the online poll (not scientific, as we know).

crossposted

This afternoon, Crikey broke the story that Rupert Murdoch met Tony Abbott while he was in Australia for his mother’s birthday celebrations.

Bernard Keane writes:

There’s now a simple test for News Ltd – whether it covers Abbott’s meeting with its proprietor in the same way as it covered Conroy’s, and whether it demands the same details of Abbott as the Sunday Telegraph demanded of Conroy – what was discussed and what hospitality did Abbott enjoy from Murdoch?

And, most of all, was there a deal made between the two for favourable coverage?

Those are good questions, though it’s a bit hard to imagine how Abbott’s coverage in The Australian could be any more favourable than it is already…

Update: Trevor Cook on Stephen Conroy’s defence of the licence fee decision.

In a piece in Crikey today, Jason Whittaker reported:

Google will argue the scope of content proposed to be filtered is too wide. In a blog post written in December, Australian policy head Iarla Flynn branded mandatory ISP-level filtering “the first of its kind amongst Western democracies” and “heavy handed”. She wrote:

Some limits, like child p-rnography, are obvious. No Australian wants that to be available?—?and we agree. Google, like many other internet companies, has a global, all-product ban against child s-xual abuse material and we filter out this content from our search results. But moving to a mandatory ISP filtering regime with a scope that goes well beyond such material is heavy handed and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information.

Flynn says the Australian filter would be unique as a mandatory framework. Germany and Italy have mandatory ISP filtering but for a limited range of sites (child-abuse material, and in Italy unlawful gambling sites).

Google told Crikey it wants “more light shed” on the technical trials, to which it wasn’t party. It’s particularly concerned about the “potential impact on speed”.

“The government’s own technical report states that someone with competent technical expertise could probably get around it. Filtering should only be seen as one part of any effort towards protecting people’s online experience. We believe that education and police enforcement is vitally important,” the spokesperson said.

Whittaker writes that Google will be putting its concerns in a submission to the Minister, Stephen Conroy.