Won’t someone think of the children, although only the children of ALP members of Parliament, because even some of the kiddy groups can see that the Government’s Great Firewall of Australia is nonsense.
via SMH:
Support for the Government’s plan to censor the internet has hit rock bottom, with even some children’s welfare groups now saying that that the mandatory filters, aimed squarely at protecting kids, are ineffective and a waste of money….
Holly Doel-Mackaway, adviser with Save the Children, the largest independent children’s rights agency in the world, said educating kids and parents was the way to empower young people to be safe internet users.
She said the filter scheme was “fundamentally flawed” because it failed to tackle the problem at the source and would inadvertently block legitimate resources.
Furthermore there was no evidence to suggest that children were stumbling across child pornography when browsing the web. Doel-Mackaway believes the millions of dollars earmarked to implement the filters would be far better spent on teaching children how to use the internet safely and on law enforcement.
“Children are exposed to the abusive behaviours of adults often and we need to be preventing the causes of violence against children in the community, rather than blocking it from people’s view,” she said.
“The constant change of cyberspace means that a filter is going to be able to be circumvented and it’s going to throw up false positives – many innocent websites, maybe even our own, will be blacklisted because we reference a lot of our work that we do with children in fighting commercial sexual exploitation.”….
James McDougall, director of the National Children’s and Youth Law Centre, expressed similar views to Save the Children.
He said the mandatory filters simply would not work and children should be able to make decisions for themselves. Concerned parents could easily install PC-based filters on their computers if they desired, or ask their internet providers to switch on voluntary filtering.
Hey hey, ho ho, Senator Conroy has to go, hey hey, ho ho….
