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The latest inflation reports for Australia are showing the seasonally adjusted underlying figure of 4% with headline inflation around 3%, but I’m starting to not believe it.

We’ve always been impartial to Bakers Delight White Flour Loaf bread (recommended for those in Australia…just great bread). Around this time last year it was around $2.20 or $2.30 a loaf. This morning I discovered that it had gone up yet again, this time from $3 to $3.20. That’s $1 in 12 months, and I can still remember paying $2-$2.10 a loaf for it in early 1996. There has alway been price rises, but this year a white flour loaf has gone up a whopping 45% and it seems there’s a 10-20c price rise every month or two. Sure, it’s only a dollar, but apply 45% to a range of other goods as well. Certainly our shopping bill has seriously risen this year, where as we might have spent $100-$130 at Coles a week (not including meat) we’re now spending $150-$180, and that’s with us buying most of our fruit and veg from the local farmers market (in bulk, cheap and wonderfully fresh). I’d hate to think what it must be like on struggle street at the moment, maybe this is part of the reason why voters chucked the Howard Government out?

A couple of days out from the election and neither party has announced a comprehensive ICT policy…because neither party has one. Kevin Rudd today talked about taking Australia up a gear and the need to fulfil our great potential, but apparently IT isn’t part of that future. The real banger: the reiteration of a policy originally announced by Kim Beazley in 2006 which I’m now officially calling “The Great Firewall of Australia” policy. Yep: no policies to encourage Internet startups in Australia or promote what Keating once referred to as the clever country, but they’re going to censor our Internet instead and I’m more than pissed. So pissed in fact that I may not preference the ALP in front of the Libs when I vote on Saturday, despite the fact that I cant stand the local Liberal candidate.

Here’s some highlights from Mao ZeRudd’s cyber-safety policy:

 a mandatory ?clean feed? internet service for all homes, schools and public computers that are used by Australian children.  Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will filter out content that is identified as prohibited by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).  The ACMA ?blacklist? will be made more comprehensive to ensure that children are protected from harmful and inappropriate online material.

Note the word mandatory. But wait, there’s more

A Rudd Labor Government will require ISPs to offer a ?clean feed? internet service to all homes, schools and public internet points accessible by children, such as public libraries.

What’s the alternative, a dirty feed, if indeed there is an alternative? And lets not forget the cost of providing this filtering, a cost that will no doubt be passed along by ISP’s who already (mostly thanks to Telstra) charge us at rates 2-3x higher (even more, given we don’t have uncapped plans) than rates the United States.

How do they determine if a computer is used by a child? My son uses 1 computer, but not my laptop + desktop, so is there going to be multiple feeds? Unlikely, because any of these computers are accessible by a child I’m going to get a mandatory censored internet…presuming that they’ll know that I have a child…which they’ll check up on via Medicare, so big brother will be imposing his will on me and I wont have a say on it as well.

This is a typical response from a traditionally socialist party that believes that the Government can interfere in everything.

Like all censorship the question is: once it starts when will it stop? Remember that Australia doesn’t have an electronic R rating (at least for computer games)…so there goes violent sites. Dissent on global warming is probably hate speech to the ALP, so that should get censored….once it starts it will never end. Do-gooder groups will petition the Government to block more and more sites, and the Government, always wanting to find support will block these sites.

The stupidest thing of all: Mao ZeRudd justifies the policy on the basis that computer level filtering is too easy to bypass. He’s obviously never heard of proxy sites, TOR or even OpenDNS to bypass server level firewalls…unless of course he’s planning on banning them as well!

If Rudd is elected on Saturday (and that’s a 95% chance) we need to start speaking up against this policy immediately. It is our duty as supporters of free speech in a democratic country to stand opposed to Government attempts to stifle free speech online. They may claim now it’s all about porn, but remember (with apologies to the original author),

first they blocked the porn sites, and no one said a thing,

next it was the dissenters, and still no one said a thing.

Next it was bloggers, and although I was one of them I said nothing.

Then they blocked me.

Remembrance Day 2007.

“MCMXIV” from Philip Larkin. It’s modern poetry, but it’s done well.

    Those long uneven lines
    Standing as patiently
    As if they were stretched outside
    The Oval or Villa Park,
    The crowns of hats, the sun
    On moustached archaic faces
    Grinning as if it were all
    An August Bank Holiday lark;

    And the shut shops, the bleached
    Established names on the sunblinds,
    The farthings and sovereigns,
    And dark-clothed children at play
    Called after kings and queens,
    The tin advertisements
    For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
    Wide open all day;

    And the countryside not caring
    The place-names all hazed over
    With flowering grasses, and fields
    Shadowing Domesday lines
    Under wheats’ restless silence;
    The differently-dressed servants
    With tiny rooms in huge houses,
    The dust behind limousines;

    Never such innocence,
    Never before or since,
    As changed itself to past
    Without a word–the men
    Leaving the gardens tidy,
    The thousands of marriages
    Lasting a little while longer:
    Never such innocence again.

Side note: I’m loving these point by point posts: it’s liberating. Verbal feedback has been all positive. If you think they suck…well, it’s this or not post at all ,which I’ve done a lot of this year as my external activities (TechCrunch, Gooruze etc) have increased 🙂

1. I’m sick of the election, and so in the Australian public. I smile when I read Crikey suggesting that the Australian print media is remiss in not giving greater coverage to the election: they are merely reflecting the wants of their readership

2. ALP is advertising on TV in Forrest, complete with a local message. They smell blood. They have never advertised in the SW as long as I’ve lived here, and why would they, it’s a safe Liberal seat. Nola “agrarian socialist” Marino the Lib candidate is doing sweat fuck all. Outside of the standard post vote letter all I’ve seen from her is a flyer in my PO Box, that fails to mention she’s a Liberal aside from a small logo right at the back. Very little in the local papers and NOTHING in my letter box. Either she’s not sold the high priced European car to fund the campaign, or head office is saying there’s nothing to worry about…which is the exact same message they gave when she who must be obeyed was the campaign chair for the Libs locally at the last state election…we lost by 10% 🙁

3. Mad Monk Abbott is losing it. You can’t pretend to be friend to the nutter religious types then swear on TV: bullshit might be correct but it’s not in his case

4. Ruddy still isn’t impressive. The Me-tooism is sickening, and yet that’s all he has to do…copy Liberal policy and add a couple of million in for good measure in what one journo on the ABC said today was Me-tooism-plus. Great description

5. My imposed apathy is having evil consequences: I’m seriously thinking about voting green. Not because I like them, god no: they are evil incarnate, but imagine if the Greens ruled Australia: the socialism/ Communism (they are pretty much commies) would drive growth down in Australia, and as a consequence interest rates would follow. Declining interest rates would drive the AUD lower which means I’d make more…which is a good thing! 🙂 An employment poor economy would also drive the price of labour down, so I could hire locally instead of China or India in the future…and that’s a good thing, right? 😉

6. Again: I’m not running for the LDP in Forrest, they asked nicely but I declined. I’ll be voting for them in the senate though. As Reagan said “Government is never the solution, Government is the problem”

7. Still no ITC policy from either party: I should contact them about that.

8. They should run the Reps as an unconference…that would be cool 🙂

Microsoft Australia’s Nick Hodge is partaking in Movember, a lets grow some facial hair in November charity event with sponsorships going to the ever excellent Beyond Blue.

I’m not a huge contributor to charity; as I’ve written on this blog in the past I use to donate to the Salvation Army until I discovered that they give cigarettes to poor people: don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-smoking, but if you’re sooooo poor you cant afford smokes that should be as good a reason to quit as any…and I don’t want my donations going towards that.

Unlike a slew of charity organizations in Australia, Beyond Blue is a-political…no seriously, they really are, which unfortunately puts them in a minority.

The black dog could bite you tomorrow so I’d encourage anyone with a spare dollar or hundred to sponsor Nick. Depression isn’t nice…and for the record I’ve been there, done that. It was called b…sorry, legally I cant say but lets just say that I was pushed to the edge in some of my previous activities. 30 sucked as well, which was probably complicit in it all. I got some decent (private) advice that set me on the straight and narrow. Lesson though: don’t think that the black dog cant get you, it can.

Nick’s id is 82950, you’ll also need to enter Nick + Hodge to sponsor. Link here.