Speech by Darce Cassidy to Adelaide Rally

Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to the Dark Ages.

My name's Darce Cassidy, and I'm from Electronic Frontiers Australia. We're a membership organisation concerned with privacy and free speech in computer communications. Together with members of the Internet industry, and users of the Internet, were organising to defeat the governments plan to censor the Internet.

It's been said that John Howard wants to legislate us back to the future, back to a time of picket fences, Sir Robert Menzies, men dressed in comfortable cardigans coming home to a meal, followed by pipe and slippers prepared by a full time housewife wearing an apron.

Well Senator Alston has taken us well beyond that. With this Bill he's taking us back towards the Dark Ages. But he'd better watch out - it's the digitial equivalent of book burning today, but how long before they start burning Senators at the stake.

You'll see a few placards around today suggesting that in the global village that we now live in, Senator Alston is the village idiot. That's fair enough. This is a democracy, and I'll defend to the death his right to make an idiot of himself.

But what we can't defend, and what we can't tolerate is a dumb government that is trying to make village idiots of us all. This Bill threatens to banish Australia to the Outernet, it threatens to bring down a digital curtain over Australia, and to relegate us the the company of countries like China and Saudi Arabia.

This government isn't just dumb, it's also deaf.

It doesn't listen to business leaders, like the head of IBM and the head of CISCO in Austraslia, who have said that the governments plan won't work, and will threaten the information economy.

It doesn't listen to the CSIRO, when the CSIRO, in this report, told the government that this type of blocking would not work. So that can go on the BBQ.

It doesn't listen to the National Office for the Information Economy, when it told the government that there was no widespread concern about unsavoury content on the Internet. They told the government that a survey they had commissioned showed, 'Inappropriate content was the smallest concern of Internet users surveyed.'

That report was the Telecommunications Performance Report 1997-8. When I tried to print it out this morning, I found that it had dissappeared from the web site of the National Office for the Information Ecomony. Perhaps they should be renamed the National Office for the Lack of Information. This then is their Annual Report, which goes on the barbie in place of the Telecommunications Performance Report.

They don't listen to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which conducted a survey which showed that two thirds of Australians held the firm opinion that X rated videos should be available to Australians. But X rated material will be banned on the Internet by this Bill.

So much for what the government thinks of business, of the Internet industry, of its own agencies, and of course its citizens, who it wants to treat like children.

I now have an apology to make. The Deputy Leader of the Australian Democrats, Senator Natasha Stott Despoja, had planned to speak here today. Unfortunately something else has intervened - something called the GST.

However, we do have some more books to be thrown on the barbie, and I'd now like to introduce Brenda Aynsley, from the Australian Computer Society.