The scene shifts to Canberra, to an office heavy with the odour of
ministerial leather.
| DR: | Welcome Puppy, what news since we last spoke?
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| PC: | We've just come from a meeting in Sydney where we all signed off
on the code.
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| DR: | Good, good. Think it will go down?
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| PC: | Unfortunate term Minister. But we might get away with it. Doc
here has been very helpful in the spin management department I must say. We
thought we could convince EFA that the new scheme was less onerous, but they
haven't fallen for it.
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| DR: | Those maniacs? I'd ignore them.
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| PC: | Not easy Minister. They're spreading the word on the Net. And
unfortunately they're not the only ones. We've got ISOC-AU and the Link
Institute up against us as well. Not to mention some of my own members.
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| DR: | Link Institute? ISOC-AU? Never heard of them.
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| TO: | They're groups of Internet experts. Some of them helped build the
Internet in Australia.
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| DR: | Well the government controls it now so it doesn't matter what they
think. You represent the industry don't you Puppy?
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| PC: | Yes Minister, if you say so.
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| DR: | I do say so. Now, what can we do to get rid of the C word?
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| TO: | The C word, Minister?
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| DR: | Censorship, you idiot. It's a dirty word, and reeks of
totalitarianism. The Liberal Party believes in the freedom of adults to
choose what they see, hear or read. We don't condone censorship.
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| TO: | We've outsourced it Minister. The government can be seen to have
it's hands clean. It's now all being done by those American filtering
companies. They'll block a huge amount of stuff we couldn't have gotten
away with, but if there's any flak we can blame them.
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| DR: | Oh I love that. The Land of the Free and the First Amendment
managing our censorship outsourcing contract! After the trouble I had from that ACLU
woman, this is delicious irony. Now, can we do anything about the F word?
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| TO: | The F word, Minister?
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| DR: | Freedom, you idiot. Freedom of expression, freedom to read,
freedom to think. The ideological nonsense that our opponents keep raving
about. There's something in the Liberal manifesto about supporting freedom,
so we've got to at least give it lip service.
|
| PC: | We've built a few freedoms into the code Minister. For instance
ISPs are free to choose whatever brand of filters they want to sell to their
customers.
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| DR: | What if the customers don't use it?
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| PC: | We'll be able to tell from the logs Minister. If we see material
going downstream that should have been filtered at the client end, we'll
know for sure they haven't installed it.
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| DR: | Hmmmm, that doesn't make any sense to me Puppy. We didn't
introduce the law to see it bypassed so easily. We have to Protect the
Children (TM).
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| PC: | If necessary we can do it at the server, Minister. That's
probably easier to manage anyway. It will be a nightmare trying to feed
filtering updates to 4 million people. The further upstream we can do it
the easier it will be.
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| DR: | I hope that doesn't mean proxy filtering. We copped a lot of flak
about that idea.
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| PC: | No Minister, we won't call it that.
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| DR: | OK, looks like we're making progress on the blocking. Now, what
about shutting down the porn sites?
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| TO: | That's on schedule Minister. The ABA is a bit reluctant to look
at porn all day, but we've convinced them there won't be so many sites to
take down once the state laws come in.
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| DR: | Hmmm, the states, I'd almost forgotten about them. What's their
role again?
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| TO: | They control the publishing laws Minister. We're trying to get
them all to agree that if it's not suitable for 15 year-olds it's a crime.
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| DR: | That seems a bit harsh, even for a censor like me. Will you get
away with it?
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| TO: | It was your idea to make it like television Minister. A few
states are holding out, so we could end up with a mess like we've got with
the videos. You know, one opts out and they get all the business.
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| DR: | Well keep pushing the A-G. We've got to get this through. What
about the condoms?
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| TO: | Condoms, Minister?
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| DR: | R-rated stuff, for goodness sake. We don't want 17-year olds
finding out about sex.
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| TO: | But the age of consent is 16, Minister.
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| DR: | Well, that wasn't my idea. We've got to stop that kind of
information getting to kids. I thought we had some kind of proof of age
thing for R-rated sites.
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| TO: | We do Minister. The ABA has drafted something on it, but on the
Internet you never know if the other person is a dog.
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| DR: | I couldn't care about dogs. Dogs don't have credit cards, but
kids do. I hope the ABA isn't proposing credit cards.
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| TO: | Well actually....
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| DR: | You've gotta be kidding! Tell the ABA that's not acceptable. If
they can't come up with something better we'll just have to shut down those
sites too. Datacasting is the new game now, so get with the program. We've
got to shift the paradigm, get rid of these nonsense ideas about free
expression and control the medium just like television. Have you got the
message?
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| PC, TO: | Yes, Minister!!
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