INTERNET FILTERING

Dr McFETRIDGE (Morphett) (11:34): I move:

That this house condemns the federal Labor government's proposed introduction of internet filtering.

I thank the house for its indulgence in this case; if it had not been for the division, and my need to be in here to speak very briefly on the former bill, I would have had my notes with me. However, I am here now. I should say that this has been a long time coming. I first introduced this private member's motion to this place in April 2009.

The Hon. M.J. Atkinson interjecting:

Dr McFETRIDGE: Something we would like to filter is the member for Croydon over there; he keeps interjecting. It would be nice if they were pertinent interjections, rather than just about freedom of speech. The member for Croydon wants to filter democracy as well as his colleagues wanting to filter the internet.

I introduced this for the first time in April 2009. I then reintroduced it on the 20 May last year. This motion is that this house condemns the federal Labor government's proposed introduction of internet filtering.

While the federal government has delayed discussion of, and possibly introducing, the internet filter, they certainly have not told anybody that it is off their agenda, and I for one do not believe that Senator Conroy is going to back down from his initial position on internet filtering. You only have to see what he said on SBS on 31 March 2009. When he was asked about it, Senator Stephen Conroy, the Minister for Communications, said:

Look, if there's an argument that the internet should be unregulated we'll have to, at the end of the day, agree to disagree. I'm a huge supporter of the civil society and the internet is the Wild West at the moment. I think—I repeat again—there's been, unfortunately a lot of misinformation spread about what our intent actually is. I was more than happy to accept to come on the show to make sure that people understood—we are talking almost exclusively about refused classification. Then we want to give parents an option...

They want to give parents an option, but why didn't the federal Labor government back the then Liberal government's voluntary option? The federal Liberal government had a plan for 'net alert' which was voluntary and opt in. It was not compulsory internet filtering but a voluntary opt in filter that you could use.

This federal Labor government wants to introduce a compulsory filter. To me, that is an indicator of how little they know about the technology of the internet and IT in the world today. I do not profess to be an expert on this. My son has a PhD on robotics and artificial intelligence and perhaps he should be the one who is talking about this. Certainly, he and all of his friends and work colleagues are dead against this because they know what it is going to do to their ability to access fast internet services. In no way should any implication be drawn that they wish to access any material that is not pure.

The Hon. M.J. Atkinson: Yeah, right!

Dr McFETRIDGE: I am deeply offended by the member for Croydon's inference there that members of my family would be wanting to access some of these sites that are intended to be banned here.

The Hon. M.J. Atkinson interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order, member for Croydon!

Dr McFETRIDGE: I am deeply offended by that and I ask him, if he cannot interject in a witty manner, not to interject at all. The bottom line is that internet speed will be slowed by up to 87 per cent by the proposals by Senator Conroy—87 per cent. This is what the ISP providers are telling me. They are telling others and they are telling Australians—this is what this government wants to do.

When you see they are going to spend $40-odd billion on a new national broadband to speed up the internet, well, what are we getting here? It is just an absolute nonsense and for them to say that this is going to improve the mental health and well being of our children in future generations, they just do not know what they are talking about. It is not going to work. There are better ways of doing it and this is not just about saying we should not be clamping down on the perverts and portrayers of pornography, it is about clamping down on them by effective means, not by making the whole of the populous suffer because there are people out there who are quite deviant in their mental behaviour.

The government is saying that the filter will restrict access to prohibited content, child pornography, inappropriate material and unwanted material. Unfortunately, it is also going to block a lot of legitimate material and we have already seen numbers of examples of that. So, once again, the government is failing.

As I have said before, it is a compulsory scheme. It is not an opt in or opt out, this is it. You are in; you will do this. This is censorship, and in a moment I will read out the countries that have internet filters in place. It is a draconian government. This is the sort of thing Gaddafi would be doing. Thank goodness for the internet and for Twitter and all those other social networking sites like Facebook. Thank goodness for them, because they are bringing democracy to those Middle Eastern countries and they are doing it because the internet is there.

What does the government over there do to try to stop that? They shut down the internet. The only problem is they are shutting down a lot of legitimate sites that businesses are using and other sites. That is what is going to happen here and this is what this government has inadvertently, perhaps advertently, I don't know, they can tell us—

The Hon. M.J. Atkinson interjecting:

Mr PENGILLY: Point of order, ma'am.

The SPEAKER: Order! Point of order, member for Finniss.

Mr PENGILLY: I ask that the member for Croydon allows the member for Morphett to speak, instead of prattling away like a starving small corella.

The SPEAKER: Yes, I uphold that. The member for Croydon will be quiet and behave himself, and stop behaving like a corella.

Dr McFETRIDGE: The member for Croydon does have some witty interjections very occasionally but, unfortunately, it is usually about things that are quite inane. I told him years ago to forget trying to interject because I just do not listen to him anymore, other than when he makes disparaging remarks about my family. That is not what you are normally like, member for Croydon; you are much nicer than that.

The bottom line is that this mandatory filter is not good for democracy, the internet, business, families or Australia. When you look at the countries around the world that are introducing this, then we really do need to think very, very carefully. Listen to this list of countries that filter the internet at the moment: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Burma (Myanmar), China, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Jordan, Libya (there is that name again), Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, the UAE, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Yemen.

There are some countries that claim to be modern, developed countries, but they use internet filtering to help control the populace—and certainly, when you look at this list of countries, that is what they are doing. That is what we are seeing at this very moment in Libya, Iran and other places, and now Senator Conroy would have that power in Australia. Let us be very, very careful about what we wish for when we talk about internet filtering. It is not good. It is not something that we should be encouraging.

In July 2009, during the estimates committee, I asked the Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries (Hon. Michael O'Brien), who is a very honourable and honest man, about internet filtering and he said, 'I think the best way to deal with that issue is by way of advice and self-censorship rather than the filter proposition that Senator Conroy is proposing.' So, once again, the minister is telling the truth, he is giving an honest opinion, and it is certainly not supporting what Senator Conroy and the federal Labor government are proposing.

The minister then went on to say, 'I agree that it has been shown to have a lot of adverse consequences in terms of speed and the like.' That is the big issue with having been put in this position; that is, we are going to spend $40-odd billion on high-speed broadband, then you are going to slow it down again. It just does not make sense.

Nobody could disagree with the overall aims of what Senator Conroy is trying to achieve by getting the smut and muck off the internet, but it is just not going to work. One of the co-founders of Internode, Simon Hackett, has made those points exactly. In a media release that was put out in 2009, he said:

It is critical to appreciate that the filter proposed will only apply to un-encrypted conventional web pages, using 'URL based filtering', despite most video content (RC or otherwise) in Australia being transported across the Internet through other means; These other transport methods are not proposed to be filtered at all.

Its as if the policy was to erect roadblocks on highways and declare victory, while ignoring the sure knowledge that the criminals being sought are flying overhead in private planes.

Mr Hackett went on to talk about refused classification content. He said:

Publishing the titles of banned books and DVD's is considered to be a fair and reasonable part of transparency in the operation of government. After all, we need to know what the government has decided that we can't read, don't we?...And yet, the government have argued that publishing banned URLs is different, because consumers can use the URL to look up the content itself...

This is the point Mr Hackett is trying to make:

It is impossible to avoid the logical fallacy here! If the ISP filter worked, then the list of filtered URLs would be safe to publish in public...because if the filter worked, nobody could access the linked content!

So, what is the government's real agenda here? Is it about censoring what it considers to be unwanted content on the internet, as we are seeing in Iran and Libya at the moment, or is it an honest and altruistic motive? I do not trust the state government, I do not trust the federal government, and I certainly would not trust them with the future of business when they look at doing this sort of thing. The fact is, as Mr Hackett says:

The government doesn't even believe that technical filtering of internet content works (or, surely, they'd be happy to publish the banned URL list because it'd be safe to do so, because...the filter works...)

The evidence that has been given by people who know the technical intricacies of how the internet works is overwhelmingly in support of an opt-in system, not a compulsory system. There is a terrific article by the Brooklyn Law School about Australia's foray into internet censorship which was published in December 2008. I was first introduced to this in April 2009 and it was a lot more relevant then, but I would be very surprised if what is being said in here is still not very relevant. The Abstract by Derek Bambauer states:

Australia's decision to implement Internet censorship using technological means creates a natural experiment: the first Western democracy to mandate filtering legislatively, and to retrofit it to a decentralized network architecture...The new restraints derive from the Labor Party's pro-filtering electoral campaign...The country has a well-defined statutory censorship system for on-line and off-line material that may, however, be undercut by relying on foreign and third-party lists of sites to be blocked. While Australia is open about its filtering goals, the government's transparency about what content is to be blocked is poor. Initial tests show that how effective censorship is at filtering prohibited content—and only that content—will vary based on what method the country's ISPs use. Though Australia's decisionmakers are formally accountable to citizens, efforts to silence dissenters, outsourcing of blocking decisions, and filtering's inevitable transfer of power to technicians undercut accountability.

This is quite a lengthy paper of some 32 pages. It continues:

The paper argues Australia represents a shift by Western democracies towards legitimating Internet filtering and away from robust consideration of the alternatives available to combat undesirable information.

It took a while to get this motion up in the house. I hope that the house does support this because it is wrong, it is wrong in all aspects. I strongly support an opt-in system for internet filtering if parents, carers and others want to opt in on a system like this, but do not come down with a system that is not going to work. It has been shown not to work by those who are far more technically knowledgeable than I am, and I believe what they are saying.

I believe what my son and his colleagues say about this, how it is going to slow down their business, their work, reduce productivity in Australia and reduce our ability to download legitimate information (for businesses and for private people), and I, for one, will not sit back and watch a Labor government that is so out of touch that it is not listening. It is not in any way in touch, never mind through the internet, with the Australian populace, so it stands condemned. I hope that the house supports my motion.

Debate adjourned on motion of Mrs Geraghty.