On Eve Of Election, Australia's Conservatives Announce Mandated Filtering Policy 87
Dan B. writes "After Australia's Conservative party (LNP) quietly posted a policy [PDF] to impose mandatory internet filtering just one day prior to the country's election, local premiere internet forum Whirlpool has gone in to overdrive with the fastest 50 page thread ever. At 8:30pm, both sides of politics were busy running media releases, with the Conservatives hastily back-pedalling on the policy, and the Government attacking it, accusing them of hypocrisy after voting down their own proposed filter 3 years prior, stating there was no proof filtering works."
Why... (Score:2)
Do politicians repeatedly insist on inserting their feet into their mouths hours before an election?
Re:Why... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a test for future policy development: if they can get away with spouting crap before the election, they know they can get away with murder afterwards.
+1 Insightful (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a test for future policy development: if they can get away with spouting crap before the election, they know they can get away with murder afterwards.
Not sure why that's currently rated at +5 Funny -- this is quite insightful. Politicians do indeed do this. Lay out a (sometimes batshit-insane extreme) policy position before an election, and if the electorate rolls over, the politicians know it'll fly just fine. If the electorate raises a holy stink, back off and propose something slightly less batshit-insane that's calibrated to squeak by. This is how bullshit becomes modus operandi. This is also how Microsoft has been working to make its Panopticon (a.k.a. XBox One) palatable to the buying public.
This approach is a proven technique. Funny? More like frighteningly accurate.
Cheers,
Re:+1 Insightful (Score:5, Funny)
An accurate description of politics is indistinguishable from absurdism.
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An accurate description of politics is indistinguishable from absurdism.
So long as we remember to laugh at ourselves, and not at the description.
Re:Why... (Score:5, Funny)
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So instead of murder they'll limit future policy to the severe beatings the electorate seems to enjoy.
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They've already back-pedalled on this policy faster than Tony Abbott walking into a gay bathhouse.
Which means they'll do it after the election.
I wouldn't be surprised if Tony likes gay bath houses, the most ardent homophobes often hide homosexual desires.
Needless to say, if Tony gets in I'm moving to Singapore, he's our George W Bush.
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Yes, because the political system in Singapore is so much better...
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Do politicians repeatedly insist on inserting their feet into their mouths hours before an election?
They were caught in a moment of honesty, voicing their opinions as they truly are, usually you see this sort of hubris after the election.
if they were on the internet we'd call them trolls
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To their credit, if it's more complex than "THIS politician made a cuss and the microphone picked it up!" or "Someone said this politician rubbed their genitals against someone else's genita
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it just always seems to happen to em the moment before it really matters, with no time to spin or back it off, or what have you.
its like the trope of the cop who says hes just days away frm retirement. and similar to the obligatory XKCD ( http://xkcd.com/1113/ [xkcd.com] ) im surprised more politicians, or their handlers, dont lock them away in a secure room without contact to the outside world in the day or two before the election, considering this just keeps happening.
of coure, its still endlessly amusing from where
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Ideally, they are supposed to do that during the campaign rather than surprising people with it after they are elected. It's what a campaign is for.
And if they are too dumb to have a well-thought-out policy early in the election, and face the backlash the night before, well, again, be glad they did it beforehand.
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Do politicians repeatedly insist on inserting their feet into their mouths hours before an election?
Well, governmental buildings are well-known hotbeds of the foot-in-mouth disease.
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Short answer: the blackout [wikipedia.org]. Now is the perfect time to reveal bad policy, because a) you can claim it was announced before the election, and b) your opponents can't call you on it in advertising.
Backlash is a wonderful thing (Score:1)
We clearly need more of it. The problem is, it doesn't seem to work as well here in the States, especially when we only find out the details after the fact. I would that the US government were as communicative as these Aussies about their bad policies before actually makign them law.
Re:Backlash is a wonderful thing (Score:5, Informative)
source [englishforums.com]
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Also used repeatedly in the King James version of the Bible.
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Which was written in 1611.
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When I say "I would that" it means "I'd hit that". Actually most things I say mean that...
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Would is a verb. My usage may be a bit archaic, but valid nonetheless.
Re:Backlash is a wonderful thing (Score:5, Funny)
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It's almost like elections in the U.S. are dominated by gerrymandering, personality, and advertisements, in a way that essentially creates a caste-based system of representation.
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Almost: Adj; is precisely the case.
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don't you have a grammar nazi rally to attend somewhere else right now?
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Due to the way the notification arrived and another anon's grammar correction, I unduly made a connection between the two posts. I apologize for the confusion.
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I agreed up until you said that we are represented. I'd say we are, at best, occasionally placated.
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It doesn't work here because a large number of people are actually entirely on-board. We're talking spying on american citizens awful peacefully. Perhaps Australians still have some dignity left to be outraged at losing.
Political stupidity at it's zenith (Score:5, Insightful)
These morons would rather put the entire country and it's IT infrastructure to the expense and trouble of a Opt out system, instead of just making it a Opt In system for those families or organizations like schools that may need such a filter.
You think the ISP or the smartphone or modem manufacturers are going to absorb the cost of this additional layer of government mandated censorship? No they are going to pass on the cost to the consumer. So for every one household that might actually use this filter, nine would not and yet those nine would still pay for it.
PS: I don't understand the logic. How does censoring my internet protect your children from porn? It just doesn't make any sense.
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>
PS: I don't understand the logic. How does censoring my internet protect your children from porn? It just doesn't make any sense.
There is no logic. This topic comes up in politics as a way to make themselves look like they are doing something "for the children". Quite frankly, in Australia and here in the U.S. the elected officials should have better things to do with their time (and our money).
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It's not the case that there is no logic. Rather, the logic just doesn't have to do with protecting kids from porn. It has to do with getting votes. But the public is developing a resistance to this tactic, and good for them for doing so. The only check on lying politicians is a skeptical and informed electorate.
Re:Political stupidity at it's zenith (Score:5, Insightful)
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Obviously, they want to block you from uploading those advanced ritual yoga [wikipedia.org] videos...
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Oh no, thats not the logic. It's about protecting you from yourself. after all, you simply cannot be trusted with your baser instincts. they must be managed by an outside entity. for your well being. you dont know yourself well enough to know your emotional or physical needs, nor can you be trusted with the responsibilty of personal choice. Trust us. Its for the best.
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The weird thing about the Liberal policy was their idea of rolling out filtering to new modems. These people must be seriously confused about what a modem does.
Just a distraction (Score:5, Interesting)
Smells like a deliberate "mistake" to keep the news outlets busy for the final day before the election. Will prevent scrutiny of their policy costings they only just released today, 48 hours before the election.
Some links to old policy (Score:5, Informative)
Fastest policy backflip in history? (Score:4, Informative)
This was alluded to in the summary but in case people just read the headline and make a knee jerk post about it ... they have already back tracked from the plan. In fact they said they never had such a plan and it was a mistaken statement in the first place.
Whichever it was, the correction certainly occurred in record time. Seeing the whole thing go down on Twitter there was barely a few hours between news outlets picking up the story of the filtering plan and Malcolm Turnbull responding and saying the whole thing was incorrect.
Official Liberal Party press release clarifying that they do NOT intend to introduce filtering: http://www.liberal.org.au/latest-news/2013/09/05/coalitions-policy-enhance-online-safety-children [liberal.org.au]
There's various other reasons that you shouldn't vote for the LNP this election. But thankfully this isn't one of them.
Re:Fastest policy backflip in history? (Score:5, Interesting)
For something that isn't policy, was never policy, was never going to be policy, and will never be policy, it certainly looks remarkably like an official policy manifesto to me:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/165690692/Coalition-2013-Election-Policy-%E2%80%93-Enhance-Online-Safety-final [scribd.com]
Are you implying their finger slipped in just such a way as to write a 10 page policy document, cost the policy, put the correct date on the document, and post the policy to their website completely accidentally? Or are you claiming that this is some sort of absurdly elaborate (and dull) hacker forgery?
At the very best, you can say that this is a policy that they entertained to quite a complete point before abandoning it- and that the almost-complete literature was made public accidentally. But that still implies that this is a policy that senior Liberals were happy to consider. The document is footnoted "authorised by Brian Loughnane", which is the party's Federal Director and Campaign Director; presumably a man who is at least relatively in tune with his party's policy attitudes.
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I'm not implying anything (hence the second paragraph beginning "Whichever it was..."). Not trying to judge either way whether it was an actual mistake, or a genuine policy which they've hastily backtracked from (I agree that it looks like the latter). Just putting the link up there for people.
For the record, I've already voted (I'm overseas so voted by mail) and it wasn't for the Coalition.
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For something that isn't policy, was never policy, was never going to be policy, and will never be policy, it certainly looks remarkably like an official policy manifesto to me:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/165690692/Coalition-2013-Election-Policy-%E2%80%93-Enhance-Online-Safety-final [scribd.com]
Are you implying their finger slipped in just such a way as to write a 10 page policy document, cost the policy, put the correct date on the document, and post the policy to their website completely accidentally? Or are you claiming that this is some sort of absurdly elaborate (and dull) hacker forgery?
Neither actually. I'm of the firm belief that this being the party that voted against censorship when the Labor party considered it, concocted this all as an elaborate ruse to keep the media busy a day before the election. It was too absurd to be true, and they backed down waaaay too quickly for them to have actually considered this as a policy. Yet somehow I turn on the radio and the TV today and all I hear about the new former internet filtering policy.
What I don't hear anything about is the Coalition pol
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In China and North Korea, don't you get sent to prison or a labor camp for a multi-year sentence if you get caught even attempting to bypass the filters?
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Did you actually read the summary? It's a non-policy that they've already backtracked from due to public outcry.
Also even if this ridiculous policy would have become reality, it was an opt-out system. Comparisons with China aren't very useful (you can't really opt out of their filter, though you can easily bypass it).
Do it (Score:1)
Now is your chance, Australia. Do the world a favor and show them, at this election, in no uncertain terms what you think of politicians who want to censor.
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So we can vote for the Labor party which attempted to introduce the legislation to censor the internet in the last parliament or vote for the Coalition which voted against censorship and has come out and said there was a mistake in wording of the policy.
Let me tell you a personal story. When my daughter was six, she was playing a game on the computer. She had seen me search for her favourite characters, so she opened a web browser, typed "Charlie and Lola" and clicked search. I was in the room, but only hal
Another scandal too? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a thread on reddit Australia - some guy claims a Liberal Party Facebook app is harvesting data using hex-encoded javascript. I'm pretty sure it's against their own privacy policy, the Facebook ToS, and possibly illegal.
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He probably means obfuscated, where all the variable and method names are replaced with gibberish. The other way to do it would be to have a small shell javascript that translates and runs a payload of what is apparently gibberish, so that it's not quite as trivial as a 'show source' to see what naughty business is being done.
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Re:Another scandal too? (Score:4, Interesting)
OK, go here: http://thechoice.liberal.org.au/assets/js/scripts_a525ba27d7083afd6698e2641babf7ff.min.js [liberal.org.au]
Find the bit that starts: decodeURIComponent((new RegExp("[?|&]"+a+"=([^&;]+?)(&|#|;|$)").exec(location.search)||[,""])[1].replace(/\+/g,"%20"))||null}var _0x8ece=["\x68\x74\x74\x70\x3A
How exactly do you describe it?
Security Theater (Score:5, Interesting)
More security theater designed to make people feel like government is doing something when it's not.
My son recently started public school. I took him on his first day only to find hundreds of kids milling about the front of the school, in the street, totally un-supervised. I tried to get in and the doors were locked. They didn't unlock until 7:30am the time class started so of course, every kid was late for first period. I went to the office and they told me due to all the school shootings (in the whole country we've had what? 1? In the past 5 years?) They said I'd have to take it up with the school board and blew me off.
Well, I did take it up with the school board. I called and pointed out that they were locking an EMPTY SCHOOL. All the kids were outside, unsupervised with no-where to go should a potential attacker arrive. It was ridiculous. To my amazement they got me in touch with the school districts director of security who conceded my point, agreed with my assessment and made a district wide policy change on the spot. She said that the change had been requested by local politicians over the summer and she hadn't really thought it through. By the time I went to pick up my kid the school was back to being unlocked. At least there are a few in government with half a brain in their head.
This is what emergency warning systems are for (Score:2)
Poor Aussies, I thought this countries conservative party was bad. They're probably going to get up to the same kind of thing next election. Got voted in on a minor scandal involving some low tier politician at the wrong time. Sad.
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IF Labor is outed, I really hope that the Tories have a minority government, so they'll force a double dissolution. That way the damage they can do to one of the strongest economies on the planet will at least be limited to what the Greens and minor parties approve of.
The Australian economy was strong because it entered the GFC with a surplus and cash in the bank. The Labor government the proceeded to spend that and drive the country in to $300 billion in debt. Between the last budget (May 2013) and July 2013, Labor mismanagement saw the deficit balloon from $5 billiion to over $30 billion. The Greens have been pushing Labor to spend even more. The good news is that everything points to the Greens having less influence in the next parliament.
Minor parties have a distinct
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