Now as you probably know I’m not one that usually subscribes to conspiracy theories, (for example, I don’t believe that the British Royal Family had anything to do with the tragic death of Princess Diana, apart of course from ordering it, using their loyal subjects) but there has been a recent pattern of events here in Australia that have been far too conincidental.
Australia, of course, is one of the world’s most beautiful and unspoilt countries to visit. A large proportion of its economy relies on the Mining and Tourism sectors. However, due to its amazing natural history and evolutionary process (until, of course, the British invaded in 1779), the land down under has been home to many wild and wonderful creatures that simply don’t exist anywhere in the world. Everyone knows about our ‘roos, wallabies, wallaroos and koalas, but Tourism Australia, in partnership with the Federal Government, supress all information about the Dropbear, for fear of crippling our vital tourism industry. They even regularly force changes to websites, under national security laws, to websites such as the Wikipedia.
For fear of censorship, this article will not talk about the dropbear. However we suspect that the Government have been putting commercial and economic pressure on Facebook to remove content such as this fan page, where young Aussies celebrate our wonderful killer koala-like meat-eating marsupials (whilst also trying to subtley warn tourists who come to our shores to watch out for them, and not to disappear in our CBD parks due to the increasing silent ambush tactics used by hordes of dropbears).
As is commonly known, and opposed by the majority of its citizens (a.k.a. voters), the Australian Government are attempting to censor the internet, lead by the poltiical ambitions of idiots such as Chief Censor Conroy and a few minority independent senators going for the Christian or “Family Friendly” vote. An excellent test of the Government’s powers came to the fore when Facebook decided to ban all Pages that wern’t related to a product or service. Consequently, the administrators of the Drop Bear fan page, which was set up to warn visitors to Australia given censorship by official channels, had to prove Dropbears existed with “official” confirmation otherwise the Page would be permanently closed and deleted.
It doesn’t take a genius to put 2+2 together doesn’t it?
Well apparently it does … Australia today announced that their Internet Filtering “Live” Pilot (a.k.a. censorship) was a complete success – even though less than a third of the “blacklist” contains illegal material – was a complete success and it will push ahead with mandatory internet filtering. As I’ve said before, anything to do with “child sex abuse content, bestiality, sexual violence and the detailed instruction of crime or drug use” should quite rightly be monitored, and people who access such information should be caught, prosecuted and punished with the full force of the law. However, all that will happen is these b@stards will use widely-available technologies to bypass the filter … which makes it more difficult (not impossible, just difficult) for them to be caught by the miniscule 91 extra AFP officers that wil be funded to try and catch them.
Moreover, due to the sensitive nature of the blacklist, access to it is restricted with no oversight to prevent governmental censorship of legal material … for example, what next? Anti-abortion websites? Pro-abortion websites? Aethiest websites? Dropbear warnings? Facebook? Whistleblower websites like Wikileaks (currently tried to be censored by the Australian and British governments, among others)?