Posts Tagged ‘Australia’

Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was ousted by his own party this week; he increasingly lost support because of backflips on election promises, badly implemented policies and the suggestion to introduce a super tax on mining profits.

The polls began to worsen and the power hungry, poll-driven Senior fraction of the Labor Party decided to waste him. His successor is Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female Prime Minister.

“Why should I care?”, you might wonder.

Under Rudd Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy, tried to introduce his much criticized internet filter, an issue I covered on this blog before. I won’t repeat what’s wrong with it but just would like to point to this video as an example of Conroy’s competence.

Conroy also called Google’s Street view snafu “the single biggest breach of privacy in history“; however, this did not stop his department to craft an Orwellian scheme that may require Australian ISPs to log and retain details of all people’s online communications and Web browsing activity.

At the same time no one really knows what’s going on because the government imposed secrecy provisions on all the parties with which it is negotiating in this matter.

“[T]he process remains completely opaque and we are being asked to agree to the imposition of a generalised surveillance regime with nothing but the vaguest reassurances about its scope, intent and the potential hazards of abuse, misuse, maladministration and outright oppression. (Well, actually, we’re not being asked at all. It’s just happening.”

It gets even scarier given the government’s intention to link the information gathered from monitoring internet activities to identifiers such as pass port numbers.

This opens up…

…the real possibility of mashing together all of the personal information available in your data matching matrix to (your income, your tax history, you bank account details, your medical records for starters) to your online life – your tweets, your Facebook account, your email, your Chatroulette history, your 4square tracking data, your blog entries, the link you clicked not realising it was taking you to a snuff porn site, the link you clicked knowing it was taking you to a celebrity porn site, the comments you leave here today, all of it.

However, now that Rudd is gone there is a chance that things might change. 

Under Gillard the Labor Party is likely to look to move on from all the unpopular policies that have been driving down its popularity; accordingly, rumours are rife that Conroy will be replaced by Senator Kate Lundy.

As Thenextweb points out this is something also Internet users outside of Australia should appreciate:

You should care because of the precedent it creates, and the global flow on effect such a precedent would create.

After all, similar schemes were considered in other countries, one of the being my native Germany.

However, the question remains in how far Lundy is really able to achieve a change in policies and in how far the Labor Party is willing to distance itself from previous policies.

Explains Thenextweb

While the opportunity to replace Conroy may be too good to pass up, the reality for the electorate is that no woman is an island, particularly in Government, and without support for a radical departure from the existing strategy, Lundy will be as effective as the man who preceded her.

At the same time she does seem more competent than Conroy and has history of engaging with new technology and its role in Government. So there’s hope of Australia getting over its traditional conservative censorship hangover – something we should all be grateful for.

-Jens

Behind the scenes of BlogCampaigning, I’m often giving Jens a hard time for not contributing more often. Some of it is good-natured ribbing about how he’s lazy, some of it is a little more serious.

The reality is that for the past few months he’s been busy finishing up his PhD, and is now on a speaking tour of Australia, so I really shouldn’t be so hard on him. (Espen, however, has no excuses.)

Part of Jens’s hard work has paid off in the form of recognition by the Sydney Morning Herald, which published an excerpt from the abstract of one of his presentations:

“For Europeans, as the Swiss banker father of a friend of mine once said, Australians are the plebeians of the Western world.

“The clichés were presented by the editor-in-chief of the German broadsheet Die Welt, Thomas Schmid, last year in an editorial. He argued that Australia lacks civilisation, everyone is dressed informally, there is a lack of social differentiation and the only thing setting the upper class apart from the middle is its higher income.

“It is an empty place with nothing in the middle—in geography nor identity. These are prejudices Australians have had to deal with almost since the arrival of the First Fleet, a fate they shared with other New World societies such as the United States.”

Read the full article here.

-Parker

As you may have noticed, I haven’t contributed much to blogcampaigning lately. The main reason is that I was organizing a trip to Australia. Now that I have finished my Ph.D. thesis about the differences in perception of digital games and mass media in Germany and Australia, I’m going to introduce it at several Aussie universities.

If there’re any Australian readers out there, I’d love to meet you!

I’ll be in Queensland from 1 April to 11 April. I’ll be giving a presentation at QUT on 7 April (Z2 Block, Level 3, Room 306, Creative Industries Precinct, 2pm – 4pm). Later that day, I’ll probably be at the Mana Bar.

From 11 April to 15 April I’ll be in Sydney. On 13 April I’ll give a talk at the Centre for Independent Studies. It’s not game-related, but it’ll deal with the question why Europeans often see Australians as the plebeians of the Western world.

On 15 April I’ll arrive in Melbourne. I’ll be at the University of Melbourne on the 16th, at Monash at on the 19th and at RMIT on the 20th. I don’t know the exact times yet, but let’s hope I’ll be able to get to sleep in.

I’ll continue to Adelaide on the 21st. No talks this time, but I’ll meet Melanie Swalwell who has done a lot of research on the history of digital gaming in Australia. I’m looking forward to some exciting talks with her. Maybe I’ll also get to meet the people behind the Gamers4Croydon party.

On 24 April I’ll fly to Perth. My presentation at Murdoch University will be either on the 27th or 28th. Again, some details still have to get figured out.

In the first week of May I’ll give a talk at my alma mater, the Gold Coast campus of Griffith University.

And that’s pretty much it. For further details check my twitter account, as I’ll be posting updates about the times and dates of the talks.

-Jens

Australia is a weird country. Given that the country’s broadband is amongst the worst in the developed world, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced a plan to build a national broadband network.

The ambitious project will take up to eight years, cost $43 billion, create tens of thousands of jobs and will see fibre-optic cable laid out to individual houses.

The fibre-optic network, providing speeds of up to 100 megabits per second, will cover 90 percent of Australians, while the rest will have access to a mix of wireless and satellite connections.

And yet Rudd lost thousands of Twitter followers in the last weeks. What happened?

In a move that somehow contradicts everything the national broadband plan stands for, the federal government decided to push ahead with its internet censorship plan.

Under this scheme a mandatory filter will block sites found on the secret Australian Communications and Media Authority blacklist and blacklists held by other countries. Moreover, a wide scope of content could be prohibited under the proposed filtering regime.
As the Australian Google blog explains:

Refused Classification (or RC) is a broad category of content that includes not just child sexual abuse material but also socially and politically controversial material—for example, educational content on safer drug use—as well as the grey realms of material instructing in any crime, including politically controversial crimes such as euthanasia.

As I’ve pointed out before, the scheme is expensive, ineffective and easy-to-circumvent. It potentially slows down an already slow internet and cripples Australia’s competitiveness in the global marketplace. The scope of the planned scheme also sets a precedent for a Western democracy by uniquely combining a mandatory framework and a much wider scope of content.

Similar to the controversy surrounding the introduction of an R-18 rating for digital games, this move seems to be a case of a vocal minority of social conservatives trying to impose their worldview on the rest of society.

One of the first groups to be backgrounded on the results of the filter trial was the Australian Christian Lobby, and not the entire Australian public. It seems the government is concerned about defying those who act as (self-appointed) guardians of community standards.

On the other hand, the censorship scheme does not enjoy the overwhelming support of the Australian public. A poll that was commissioned by GetUP! found only four percent of Australians want the government to be responsible for protecting children online. 

The move alienates potential Labor voters, while the people who care about these issues are unlikely to vote for the party in the first place. It would also be interesting to see what would happen if the Liberals, now under leadership of conservative Tony Abbott, were to win the next election.

It seems that if fast broadband is introduced into Australia, its citizens will only be allowed to use it on the government’s terms. If something violates the moral standards of the country’s leaders it must be hidden or ruled out. Rudd already demonstrated this tendency towards social engineering in the discussions about the controversial pictures of Bill Henson.

Australia, it seems, still suffers from a conservative hangover that already led to unparalleled censorship campaigns in the Western World—90 years ago. 

However, times and media have changed. These days the concern is not what will and will not be blocked, but who will and will not be able to get around it.

As tech writer Kathryn Small puts it:

“Conroy will not be censoring the internet. He’ll be censoring people who do not know much about the internet.”
[A]nyone with a vested interest who knows enough about software design will be able to circumvent the system. “The real problem is Conroy will create a two-tiered system [with] a massive disparity between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ of computer literacy.”

-Jens