My old online acquaintance Duncan Riley has a piece up on The Next Web about Australia’s burgeoning censorship regime. I’ve lighted on this subject before when mocking Oz’s plan to put small breasts on its free speech shitlist. I wasn’t aware, though, of the larger move toward depriving Australians of their basic human right to free speech. As Riley summarizes Australia’s proto-filter:

The Censorship Minister Stephen Conroy has stated that all Refused Classification content will be banned, which in Australia would extend to computer games unsuitable for children (Australia has no adult (R18+) rating for computer games,) small breasts, information about euthanasia, discussion forums on anorexia, as well as the usual nasties of child porn. To complicate matters, a site may be refused classification in Australia if it links to a site that is refused classification, which could literally result in half the internet being blocked.

Well, shit. There go my Australian readers. Both of them.

Australia already has a country-wide classification scheme for content. Films are rated within a multi-level system which not only contains a rating of “X,” but a non-rating called “Refused Classification.” Whereas X-rated material is banned everywhere by the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory, distribution or possession of Refused Classification content is a felony subject to a large fine and/or 10 years in prison. (But, wait – they’re already in Australia…) As for the Internet, Australia already has what Wikipedia describes as “the most restrictive [laws] in the Western world.” The government maintains a blacklist of Web sites, which was leaked last year. It includes gay and straight porn sites, several YouTube videos of questionable morality, and the Web page of a dentist in Queensland. It also contains pages about “questionable” religious groups – from Satanists to Christians – as well as several pages from the site Wikileaks, which fights to drag official secrets into the light of day. Tellingly, one of the Wikileaks page banned by Australia was the Danish Internet blacklist.

This list is expanding. It’s (supposed to be) secret. And the Australian government wants it enforced by a country-wide firewall.

The leaked list confirms what we already know about censorship regimes: they always go beyond their stated intentions. Thailand’s blacklist, which was promoted as a tool in the fight against child porn, now contains sites critical of the Thai royal family. Once a people allow their government to have these tools, the small and petty souls who dwell within the halls of power will use them to further their own prurient interests – which means everything from censoring “immoral” material to crushing dissent.

Duncan says that the world should be worried about Australia’s blacklist, and the effects it could have on speech throughout the Western world – particularly in Britain, but even in the United States. Fortunately, the tradition of free speech is so rabid here that I think it’d take decades of demagoguing to build support for the United Firewall of America. As Thomas Jefferson said, though, “eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.” And Goddess knows my countrymen have not shown themselves immune to the charms of an empty-headed demagogue.

australia, censorship, duncan riley, free speech, great firewall of australia, internet, wikileaks