Today I had an op-ed in the National Times (Fairfax) about grassroots participation in party politics. It’s been a long time since politics was a genuine mass movement. That’s not good for the country. Here I do my bit to encourage people to think about giving it a go.

Take a look here.

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.

There’s a piece by me today over on New Matilda on the Google/China fight. It’s nice to write about someone else’s filtering problems for once.

Have a read here.

Note: Colin lived in China in 2009 and as EFA’s internet censorship spokesman has previously commented on China’s Internet Censorship regime.

It’s been a while since I’ve had the time to write fiction, but last time I did I had a lot of fun. I collaborated with Aidan and we wrote – difficult as it sounds – a humorous science fiction story called Working Holiday. The result was actually pretty good and was published in an anthology called “Australien Absurdities”. Now it’s seen the light of day again as an audio version over at the Dunesteef Audio Fiction podcast. They did a great job with the voices and effects, and I got a laugh out of it. They then to go on to discuss what commentary we could have been making about the Iraq war, which I thought was even funnier.

Have a listen here.

The pressure is still on Conroy over his plan to censor Australia’s Internet. The public and the opposition are still calling for the plan to be abandoned and the Government to come clean. My own contribution, which takes a Western theme today, is an op-ed in the Australian. Despite all the noise, though, I think Conroy will use the test results to announce that filtering is feasible and going ahead. We’ll see in the coming weeks and months.

Read my piece here.