Conroy abandons speed hump plans for Australia's freeways.Gold. Just gold.
aturner | December 21, 2009
In the face of a significant public backlash, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has backed down on plans to install speed humps on every Australian freeway.
Last week Senator Conroy said he was confident that placing speed humps every 100 metres on all Australian freeways would protect children - reducing accidents by 100 percent with a "negligible" impact on traffic congestion and travel times. The plan was supported by traffic management trials which had only been conducted in suburban back streets.
The plan to throttle Australia's road transport system was slammed by critics as flawed, unworkable, easily bypassed, politically motivated and open to abuse, as reported in the media on Friday.
After listening to public concern over the mandatory speed hump plan, Senator Conroy today abandoned the concept in favour of public education campaigns and better policing.
"Over the weekend I've realised that I don't actually know that much about traffic management and it might be best to listen to the experts," Senator Conroy said.
"I realise that certain segments of the community were keen on the idea of mandatory speed humps, using them as a tool to control everywhere Australians go and everything they see. Such a plan is not acceptable in a democratic country and would make Australia an international laughing stock."
Rather than waste the time and money already invested in the mandatory speed hump plan, Senator Conroy has decided to apply the exact same concept to Australia's internet access - introducing mandatory ISP-level internet content filtering for all Australians. He has ignored criticisms from networking experts and consumer advocacy groups that the mandatory internet filtering plan is just as unworkable as speed humps on the freeways.
"There are a lot of analogies between Australia's road system and its broadband internet network," Senator Conroy said. "Both are critical infrastructure, vital to the nation's economy. Both require significant investment and long-term planning, driven by experts in the field. Neither should be manipulated for short-term political gain at the expense of the nation's future."
"The difference is that your average man on the street can understand how foolish the speed hump idea is, but if we apply the same concept to Australia's internet access most people will blindly accept it because they don't understand how ill-conceived and unworkable the idea is."
"People might have thought we were joking about speed humps on the freeway, but I can assure you the plan to do the same to the internet is completely real. It's been all over the news. That's fine, because anyone who opposes mandatory internet filtering obviously loves kiddie porn."
"We know the filtering plan will work, because a website opposing mandatory filtering was taken offline in record time last week. Australia's domain authority body pulled the plug on stephenconroy.com.au in three hours, even though the process generally takes days. That clearly proves that we can eliminate unsavoury websites, although once the web filtering is in place you won't even know that we've done it."
More details of Senator Conroy's mandatory ISP-level internet filtering can be found at nocleanfeed.com.
Tuesday 22 December 2009
Anyone who opposes censorship must love kiddie porn.
As a follow up to this the SMH blogger aturner has posted an update to his piece about Senator Stephen Conroy proposing speed humps be installed across Australia's freeways and highways. Like the first one it's so good that it's just not worth chopping bits out, so I make no apology for quoting en bloc again (my emphasis in the last couple of paragraphs).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I realise the irony of deleting a comment on a post about censorship but when it's just a URL for porn and nothing to do with the subject it goes in the bin. Not because it's porn as I'd do the same if it was pushing egg whisks or days out at the zoo. I don't have a problem with porn as such. Spam is spam and it's not wanted here.
Post a Comment