Simon_Jester wrote:
Chaosman, that can't be the entire problem here. Notice that one of the parties that dug in against this bill was the Greens. The Greens are traditionally the kind of people who come up with nanny state "interests of society" policies, aren't they?
I don't know much about the Australian Greens, but not every Green party is the same. The Czech Green party is quite economically right-wing and is currently in coalition with the Civic Democrats and Christian Democrats, for example. This aside; almost every political party advocates government interference, the difference is in when and where they think it should interfere. In my experience, Green parties tend to be strongly in favour of political and civil liberties.
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They don't understand the practical issues (why this bill won't work as intended). They aren't familiar with how immensely useful sites like Wikipedia are, so they don't automatically think "will this bill interfere with ordinary Internet use?" They don't understand the physical infrastructure of the Internet; even most Internet users don't. So their natural reaction is to assume that the those clever boffins actually have a way to block filthy content that is illegal to possess, without imposing major restrictions on legitimate use. That's how this bill is being pitched to them by people they expect to know.
There's also the fact that they think being ostentatiously anti-paedophile will win a lot of support, particularly from people who aren't internet savvy. There may well be a calculation that gains from this approach will outweigh losses from people who feel their internet freedoms are being removed. It's the same logic that causes governments to repeatedly ignore the advice of scientific research into drug policy.
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And there's a tradition along those lines. It's not centuries old, but at least it exists. Legal battles fought over books that the old Victorians considered obscene have created that tradition during the past 80 to 100 years. Because there is a tradition, the parliamentary system handles it reasonably well.
It's interesting to note that, whilst the famous obscenity trial over Lady Chatterly's Lover resulted in a victory for liberty in the UK; it was still banned in Australia for much longer, as was a book about the trial. Australia does still have a
board of book censors (though they don't call it that); but I don't know when the last time they banned something was. The UK, on the other hand, is now free of censorship - good old Human Rights Act.
Edit: well, the UK
was free of censorship. There's been all sorts of nasty illiberalness in recent Criminal Justice and Terrorism Acts, so I think literature promoting terrorism or describing how to make bombs may now be subject to some form of censorship. And they bought in legislation to ban extreme pornography, recently, too.