Conroy Announces Mandatory Internet Filters to Protect Children

It has been announced that the Australian government is going to start requiring internet ISPs to insert mandatory filters on all pornography and “inappropriate content”.  This scheme has been put in place to better protect Australian children from the dangers of the internet and the horrors of naked people.

However, so far, the following points have not been addressed:

1.  What is inappropriate content?  The Australian Communications and Media Authority are the ones responsible for deciding it, but so far there seems to be no idea as to what it will be. The Australian’s article adds a further category of ‘violent’. Once again, there is no listing of the sorts of things that the filter will catch. Anything above what would otherwise be an R rating? MA? PG? Anything related to a subject that potentially could, with the right glasses on, be considered terrorism?
2. Conroy claims that “We have always argued more needs to be done to protect children,” however this essentially takes away yet another decision from the children’s primary caretakers — the parents. Let’s be entirely honest here, kids were viewing porn far before the advent of the internet; will pornpgraphic magazines and videos now be banned in homes that have children? How will that be policed?
3. Will there be penalties for parents who opt out of the porn filter, which then results in their children seeing ‘inappropriate’ material?
4. Will there be penalties for viewing certain types of inappropriate material, even for adults?
5. How much logging of the material that is filtered will be done? If someone regularly searches for child porn, for example, will that be recorded so the person can be arrested/charged? What about porn in general? Or people who require these things for very real purposes? (ie the civilian watchdogs hunting down and reporting child porn, the university student doing a research project on the rise and methods of terrorism)

Yes, there is the option of opting out by contacting one’s ISP. The question becomes…who wants to be the person calling up their internet service provider and saying ‘bring me the porn’? Even if, in most cases, it’s as much about the rest of what they will be filtering as it is about naked b00bies.

Posted on January 2nd, 2008 by Jairissa
Filed under: australian politics | No Comments »

Workchoices. In light of the recent election, I believe this is one of the things that will most come under fire. It has certainly been pegged as one of the main reasons that undecided people changed their votes from the Coalition to Labor. So I thought I’d give my opinions on it, including who/what/where/when/why/BBQ. Now most of this stuff is old, I get that. I’ve mainly included it as it gives some perspective as to why I desire certain (exceptionally naive) end solutions.

I want Workchoices scrapped entirely, as it was a ridiculous idea from the beginning and has put the workers of Australia in a horrible position. Do I think this will happen? No, I do not. Governments are always weary about scrapping something that another government has put in place unless it has been quite a few years since. So, obviously, I would like it heavily amended. But then I wondered…what do I want it amended to? What problems do I have with it? And, in those few words, this particular post got a lot longer.

If we look at this strictly from a numbers point of view, I think it’s safe to say that a large percentage of Australians are against it. An ABC poll has stated that upwards of 55% of Australians disagree with this legislation, with only 24% supporting it. Obviously one news site can’t give a truly accurate number, but it’s fairly representative of the general numbers of people who support the legislation rather than are against it.

According to the Workchoices Site:

The national workplace relations system provides more choice and flexibility for employees in the workplace. The system offers better ways to balance work and family life and receive greater rewards and incentives.

And, like Communism, in theory this principle is sound. People have skills, and theoretically employers want them. As such you are able to better barter your skills when you are able to negotiate an individual agreement rather than being stuck with the same award agreement that the rest of your, potentially less-skilled, co-workers are under. Obviously, however, and this is a but with a capital B, this is hardly how it works in practice.

It’s an employer’s market out there at the moment, and for the most part, particularly for skills that don’t require many years of advanced training, employers can either train other employees in these skills or pay for employees to be externally trained if need be. It’s cheaper for them to send someone out on a training course worth a couple of hundred dollars than negotiate a better agreement for someone else that may cost thousands.

So does it work? Well, let’s take a look at one of the case studies on our previously mentioned Workchoices Site: We kept our sick leave and all our other penalty rates in the new agreement. They basically offered us what we wanted. No-one would sign without getting what they wanted or what they had already built up. Now we get incentives as well as our regular pay.

I asked if we were all going to be offered these new agreements, even the people close to retirement. They said yes, everyone would be offered the new contract, if they wanted it. We were all offered the chance to sign the new agreement, but we didn’t have to. No-one has been pushed to sign and for the guys who didn’t want to sign, there’s no retribution; they are still here and work the same as they did before.

So essentially what this site is telling us is that, in their best case scenario (good enough to be used as a case study), Workchoices allows for employees to negotiate for exactly what they would have had otherwise. If this is their best case scenario, I think it is easy to imagine where the not quite so good scenarios go.

Who is the most affected by this? Well, financially, if a high income earner with a specific skill base that took them years to obtain wants to come in and negotiate a great agreement, who’d say no? It would cost an employer a fortune in time and money to train someone else up in this skill base, so of course they will negotiate the better agreement.

A lower income earner, on the other hand, with skills that can easily be learned by someone else? It makes little to no financial sense to then give them a superior agreement. After all, they’re easily replaced. So as always, it is the low income earner that is in trouble, as the Workchoices legislation theoretically (as long as it is viewed as ‘fair’ and meets certain minimum requirements) allows the person not only to be unable to get a better agreement, but in fact they come up for a much worse one.

I won’t even go into the scrapping of the unfair dismissal laws for companies with less than 100 employees. I won’t.

So what would I like to see? I’ll make it simple. If they must keep these ridiculous laws in place somehow, I would like to see the unfair dismissal laws reinstated to include companies with less than 100 employees. I would like to see it required that all companies have a negotiated collective agreement (preferably with union involvement. I know some people hate unions but at the very least they would be rabid about entitlements and the best deal possible) and employees, if they wish, would be able to negotiate for something better than this agreement but not for something worse.

Posted on November 27th, 2007 by Jairissa
Filed under: australian politics | No Comments »