As some of those close to me will know, I have recently resigned my membership in the ALP and joined the Greens. Although it might seem a sudden move to some, it has been a long time coming and was not an easy decision or one taken lightly. I’m still new to the party, but I have learned enough to know that I have definitely made the right decision. If you’re curious as to my reasons and experiences, please read on.

Why I joined the Labor Party

I don’t have a background in student politics – I came to political involvement much later in life. I joined the ALP when I lived in California. My political consciousness, while probably not underdeveloped compared to the average voter, was prodded by the continuing outrages of John Howard and George Bush. By the time the Tampa affair, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay were all unfolding, I felt something had to be done – if for no other reason but to feel a little less powerless.

(more…)

Today’s sacking of Catharine Deveny by the Age is the latest in a string of people getting in trouble for offensive tweeting. Nick Snowden was kicked out of the Liberal party only a couple of weeks ago.

I think this is a terrible move by Age and sends a terrible message. Is it too much to hope our newspapers might wear a little embarrassment for the sake of erring on the side of free expression?

Is The Age suggesting that Catharine is an advocate of child sex, as evidenced by her tweet? If so, the sacking might indeed be justified. Some views are too extreme or offensive to the public to want to have them associated with your organisation. As a media organisation, I wouldn’t want to employ virulent racists, for instance – not only are they unpleasant people, it would be bad for business. Encouraging promiscuity in 11-year-olds would be a pretty extreme and offensive position to most people.

However, if The Age doesn’t believe that’s Catharine’s position, it must believe the tweet was a joke – an offensive, off-colour joke. This means that they fired a humorist, known (and hired) for being edgy, for making a one-sentence offensive joke on her own time in another medium.

To me that’s obviously no way to run a newspaper. A newspaper can employ somebody who writes something they wouldn’t publish in another medium, surely. Are Age columnists all constrained to having opinions that are uncontroversial enough for the papers of a daily broadsheet, even when not on the Fairfax clock?

This trend concerns me a bit. Imagine I make an embarrassingly off-colour joke today, then I run for office in 10 years time. Must I defend everything, including its context, lest it be held up forever as an example of ignorance, insensitivity, bigotry, or just a ribald sense of humour? I’d be worried if all of our future politicians are selected from only those who, in their 20s, never dared to write something embarrassing.

I hope Catharine finds another outlet for her writing.

For more corporate censorship fun, if you missed it, see my article on the iPad in New Matilda last week.

I have an opinion piece in today’s Age, expanding on the theme of offensive internet content: do we need Rudd to step in and save us? I’m seeing more and more panic, fanned by the media, and a sense of proportion is quickly being lost.

This also continues on my new favourite theme, “Why should the Internet be any different?” I particularly dislike this sentence, often uttered by Senator Conroy, as it so clearly has a number of obvious answers explaining why the Internet is fundamentally different to other media. More on that later.

The online version of the piece is available here.

Conroy will be facing questions about the filter on ABC Radio National’s “Australia Talks” show at 6pm today, and I’ll be there to ask a few of my own.

There’s a depressing cycle repeating itself in the Australian news. Something nasty happens. The media report the outcry about how nasty it is. Then comes the depressing bit; the politicians, wanting to be seen to respond to the confected crisis, propose some sort of ill-thought-out, knee-jerk regulation to mitigate it.

A good example is Senator Nick Xenophon’s reaction to the tragic murder of Carly Ryan. Apparently, her killer lied about his age online to entice her into a meeting. The Senator’s proposal, therefore, was to outlaw lying about your age to minors online. Can anything be said in defence of such a proposal? Never mind that the crime is vanishingly rare. Isn’t it enough that rape and murder are already illegal? How many murderers would balk at a little lie, legal or not, in pursuit of a victim?

The trend is worse when it comes to the internet. Recently we’ve had flaps about racist speech, and do you remember the furore over a stupid web game called “Muslim Massacre”? If there is a politician who can resist the temptation to forcefully condemn something so obviously tasteless, I’ve yet to see one.

(more…)

If you’re a politician, and something nasty is brought to your attention, what do you do? The best and sometimes only tool in your toolbox is the one you reach for. The tool is this: to pass a law banning it. Therefore, although it’s always discouraging, a story like this one, is far from unusual or surprising. ”Laws to tackle racism on the Internet are set to be beefed up,” it announces.

“Authorities warn they are often powerless to act against online content, which is responsible for almost one in five racial vilification complaints,” it continues, then:

Attorney-General Robert McClelland has ordered the Australian Human Rights Commission to conduct a sweeping review of ”arrangements for dealing with racist material on the internet”.

”While freedom of expression is one of the most fundamental rights, this is not at the expense of the rights of people, while using the Internet, to be treated with equality, dignity and respect,” Mr McClelland told The Sunday Age.

Certainly, nobody likes hate speech. But these words, by our Attorney-General, are concerning. Firstly, they show a terrible lack of  consideration of the complexities of the issue, and secondly, they demote freedom of speech in a significant way.

Banning racist content on the Internet might seem like a good idea on the surface, but you don’t have to dig very deep before the idea becomes problematic. The existing laws throughout the states grapple with some thorny issues. How do you define hate speech? “Kill all Jews” certainly counts, but what about “Liberate Palestine”? Is Holocaust revisionism hate speech? What about an honestly held  opinion on the undesirability of immigration from a certain part of the world? Does this inspire “hatred, contempt or severe ridicule” against a group of persons? These ambiguities will become more problematic if a new national law is introduced that applies to every blog on the Internet.

The proposal also shows a considerable lack of understanding about the realities of censoring the Internet. The Internet, it should go without saying, is global. Billions of web pages are out there, far beyond the reach of Australian lawmakers, and reflecting a multitude of different cultural values. Content hosted in Australia can be removed, but it can just as easily be moved or copied overseas by its authors. It is therefore questionable whether any law could have a meaningful impact.

The comments by the AG and others pay lip service to freedom of speech, but their words lack conviction. Freedom of speech is fine, but “not at the expense of the rights of people… to be treated with equality, dignity and respect.” That sounds like a noble sentiment, but are we certain that freedom of speech shouldn’t include the right to be mocking, disrespectful and offensive? There are definitely limits to freedom of speech that we can all agree on. But the above comments seem more like a dismissal of free-speech concerns than a debate of their merits.

We need to ask ourselves, is this the best way to tackle racism in Australian society? Is racist web content a cause of racist attitudes, or merely a symptom of it? In our view, other, more substantive and community-based policies are needed if we want to see a real improvement in this area.

I think Tim Dunlop missed the point yesterday in his Crikey piece about the Men at Work/Kookaburra case. Trying to decide whether they did or did nor borrow the melody from the folk song seems, to me, insignificant compared to the question of “should it matter if they did?”. Here’s my response (as a letter) in today’s Crikey.

Re. “Music copyrights and wrongs: money hits the right note“. Tim Dunlop’s piece seems to have missed some of the larger issues at play in the “Kookaburra” case. To me the question shouldn’t be whether a musical riff was borrowed consciously or unconsciously, was part of the composition or the arrangement. It’s not who owes whom money. The question is whether culture can grow and thrive under conditions where a few notes can land you in a courtroom.

(more…)

Stilgherrian has been covering the iiNet trial for Crikey (good job, Stil), and wrote yesterday about Conroy’s rather worrying remarks on the subject indicating that the ISPs and entertainment industry should get together and sort out a way to solve this problem.

This makes some sense if the two parties get together and and discuss a new business model that brings entertainment to Internet users in a way that is convenient and fairly priced, or even if it allowed users to opt-in to a revenue sharing deal that legitimised peer-to-peer file sharing. It seems highly unlikely, though, that the copyright lobby will suddenly wake up and smell the reality. Instead, if they get together with ISPs at all, it will be to find a way to spy on users and shut down Bittorrent any way they can. They will wield the cudgel of legal action without restraint.

(more…)

Recently the trends in Internet freedom have been all bad. China’s censorship regime escalated dramatically over the last 12 months, with a more aggressive Golden Shield, tumultuous events in Iran and of course Australia’s own filtering plan. It is therefore extremely heartening to see the tough new stand on Internet freedom taken by the USA.

The new approach was outlined last week in a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who declared the free access to information online as critical a human right as the freedom of assembly or the right to publish. Although barely mentioning China in her speech, Clinton was clearly setting the stage for a showdown with Beijing, declaring that “countries or individuals that engage in cyber attacks should face consequences.” The Chinese government responded angrily, declaring the Chinese internet “open”, demanding the U.S. “respect the facts” and calling the speech”information imperialism” in an official newspaper.

This is a pretty bad look for the Rudd government. It is my belief that they thought the filtering plan would be relatively uncontroversial, would wedge the opposition, and would allow them to check a few boxes to do with election promises and helping kids. Suddenly, they find themselves swimming against a rapidly accelerating tide.

Senator Conroy, I believe, hates it when Australia is compared to China in these sorts of debates. Conroy has no plan to censor political speech in Australia (I certainly believe this), so he sees any comparison to China or Iran as a cheap shot, dishonest and unfair. I think it simply doesn’t occur to him that the system itself is a danger. If you created a secret police force with the express purpose of weeding out terrorists amongst the population, would that be of concern if that was the extent of their mission? Of course it would. People are people, and regularly exceed their mission or their authority. (It’s happened before here – google “special branch” and “cold war”.)

To borrow a phrase from Bruce Schneier, it’s bad civic hygiene to allow our rights to be eroded without an excellent reason. In a free democracy the default position should always be to preserve openness and transparency. The government needs to make a watertight case if they want to take new powers onto themselves.

That case can’t be made for Internet filtering, and the Government knows it. This explains the amusingly defensive tone of Friday’s media release. It’s pure, panicked spin.

I made similar comments to the ABC on Friday. My full take on the subject can be found over at EFA here, or in today’s Crikey here.

When I was a naive undergraduate, I laboured under a severe misapprehension. I thought that people believed things because they had heard the evidence and believed those things to be true. If somebody believed something that was (in my opinion) wrong, it must have been because they had bad information or had heard a mistaken argument. Therefore, all I had to do was simply furnish them with better information and a logical argument and we’d agree on the facts.

Needless to say, I had a lot of long and pointless conversations back then.
(more…)