Why is it that 90% of the stories we hear involving Australia and technology are about stupid moves by the government? Is there something unique about Australia?
1. Australia has a history of communications ministers who are simply inappropriate for the role (google: "worlds biggest luddite").
2. The latest minister, Senator Conroy, and his government choose to focus their political will and energy on attempts to censor information and apply control over what Australians can and can't see on the Internet.
3. This is largely because the sitting government has an interest in pleasing an organisation called "The Australian Christian Lobby", who have openly, publicly and repeatedly called for censorship of the Internet. The ACL influence a significant voting block across a large number of constituencies.
4. The news from down here regarding the intersection of Government and technology seems bad because there isn't any good news to plug the gaps between the bad news.
5. The government does very little to foster an environment to encourage entrepreneurship or technical innovation by start-ups and micro-companies.
6. Finally, Australia doesn't have a bill of rights. Unlike the US and England, the High Court doesn't always have the final say on matters. The government is relatively free to introduce laws where it needs to in order to continue it's agenda (getting reelected).
And to end on some good news, the government did recently open a new fund to be managed by local VCs, of which at least some of it will trickle through to Internet technology startups:
We have a particularly stupid government, even with the caveat that governments are particularly stupid.
That said, it's somewhat interesting this is being linked from here now, it gives the impression that this is an attempt at damage control over cablegate on the part of our idiot politicians, but if you look at the release date of the linked article this is completely unrelated to the recently released cables.
"... Why is it that 90% of the stories we hear involving Australia and technology are about stupid moves by the government? Is there something unique about Australia? ..."
Yes.
Australian cultural DNA is a weird hybrid of the US, UK with it's own particular mutation. Despite being blessed with a large land mass, Australia is devoid of imagination and cannot successfully combine technology and entrepreneurship like the US. It has the smarts but lacks the sophistication of public relations and finance of the UK.
At a political and business level we seem to get stuck with leaders who revel in being 50 years behind the times.
Yes, our finance system lacks sophistication, uhuh... which is why we banned credit default swaps BEFORE the financial crisis, and our banks were never in danger of collapse because of the currency reserves we make them hold. And our foreign debt is miniscule.
So call us primitive if you like, but look at what your sophistication has brought you.
I think the fact our housing bubble hasn't popped yet goes a long way to explaining why our banks look to be in such great shape. I'm not sure all the patting ourselves on the back is necessarily warranted.
For example, the leverage of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia is about 19:1, where most of their assets are residential mortgages :
"... I think the fact our housing bubble hasn't popped yet goes a long way to explaining why our banks look to be in such great shape. I'm not sure all the patting ourselves on the back is necessarily warranted. ..."
Yes, the Australian economy depends heavily on China's at the moment. If China proves unable to maintain its current growth rate, Australia is likely to suffer a pretty severe downturn.
"... Yes, our finance system lacks sophistication, uhuh... ..."
By lacking sophistication, I mean a system of alternative capital (VC) that fully recognises Startups as a serious way to generate wealth instead of say lending money for property development, mining or agriculture.
"... So call [us] primitive if you like, but look at what your sophistication has brought you ..."
My mistake, I was thinking macroeconomic instead of microeconomic.
You're right, it's yet another aspect of the "Australian invents something, Australia refuses to invest, Australian goes overseas and makes tons of cash" phenomenon.
"By lacking sophistication, I mean a system of alternative capital (VC) that fully recognises Startups as a serious way to generate wealth"
That's definitely changing, e.g Innovation Bay, Startmate, the Sydney Angel Sidecar Fund, and others. VC/Angel investing is not at the same maturity as overseas yet, but it's definitely changing.
They're what we would consider a "free country" yet in regards to the Internet they act like a Totalitarian Government. Which puts the focus on those actions.
hmm.. this is interesting. Someone once quoted that India is the only ex-Commonwealth country (including Canada AND the UK itself) that has the most iron clad constitutional guarantees on free speech.
I'm not sure how accurate that is though - India has on occasion banned books (like Salman Rushdie's work) to prevent potential civil unrest. But there are similar precedents in the USA.
The Indian Penal Code, framed by the British in colonial times, contains a number of laws that make giving offence a crime, and throttle free speech. For example, there’s Section 295 (a), which makes it a non-bailable offence to “outrage religious feelings or any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.” There’s Section 153 (a), which seeks to punish “any act which is prejudicial to the maintenance of harmony between different religious, racial, language or regional groups or castes or communities”. There’s Section 124 (a), which prescribes life imprisonment for anyone who “by words or expression of any kind brings or attempts to bring or provoke a feeling of hatred, contempt or disaffection towards government”—something that any critic of any government could be accused of.
The constitution, framed not by the British but by the freedom fighters who got us independence, cops out when it comes to free speech. While Article 19 (1) (a) pays lip service to it, Article 19 (2) lays out “reasonable restrictions” such as when it applies to matters such as “public order” and “decency or morality”, matters which are, of course, open to interpretation. I’d love it if we had something like the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which contains no such caveats—but sadly, we don’t.
The Australian government will fail to censor the web next year. It has failed every year since 1996, when it first announced its intention to do so.
This is smart politics. The government tells Australia's religious kooks that it's on God's side. Meanwhile, the civil liberties mob focuses on something the government can't do, and it gets up to worse bastardry with less embarrassment.
Selectivity bias. Australia doesn't do much else that would be worth mentioning in these circles (when was the last time an Australian startup did anything interesting) while the actions of the government are exactly the kind of news that gets posted here.
Edit: What's missing though is investment in technology startups, apart from the plethora of financial systems, the much touted National Broadband Network and a handful of research projects.
There are plenty of awesome things happening in the Australian tech scene. Unfortunately the tyranny of distance and lack luster investment and government support means we can struggle a bit to get our message out. I know of a bunch of people with fantastically profitable businesses servicing international user bases that you won't ever hear about.
Because they're not in the "scene" they don't get talked about but they're plugging away at their businesses making serious $$.
I am concerned that the rights of Australian citizens are being unjustly impinged. To fine someone $11k per day because they choose to link to a website is a slap in the face of free speech and free citizens of the world.
I often forget how much we take for granted our right to free speech in America, until I read a story from a country that doesn't have the same constitutional protections.
This is tangential, but I only appreciated Greek airtravel when I had a TSA agent grope me when entering the US. In my case, I actually experienced your lack of constitutional protections (or constitution in general, in airports), and I have another such experience to look forward to when leaving.
Not remotely comparable. In the story you linked to, assets linked to specific crimes committed in the US were seized using civil forfeiture rules (if they were in fact seized; see: stories suggesting this is a hoax). The owners of those domains received court orders and have ample due process protections.
Ordinary citizens linking to those sites or to the new versions of those sites sure to be launched shortly aren't touched at all by these actions; the goal being to shut down ongoing criminal enterprises and not to stifle speech.
Read analyses of the State Department Counsel's letter to Wikileaks to see that the government has had to stop short of even calling Wikileaks itself a criminal actor (the leak itself of those documents to WL being prima facie a crime, but not one WL has liability for). The largest media companies in the United States are publishing the contents of those documents, for profit, with virtually no legal exposure.
Some of those "criminal enterprises" were criminal only because they distributed data the US government said should not be distributed. WikiLeaks distributes data the Australian government has decided shouldn't be distributed. It sounds a little bit comparable to me, even if you agree that one kind of data should be allowed and the other shouldn't.
No, they were criminal enterprises because they violated multiple decades-old statutes in the US code. Moreover, speech (or links to speech) weren't restricted; only assets belonging to enterprises accused of copyright violations.
And, again, the sites weren't simply "blacklisted", but rather had their assets sued for and seized in an actual civil action.
Could the title of this be changed please? This was from March 2009 and is unrelated to the Wikileaks cablegate thing. (Having both on the same page is confusing a lot of people)
This is not just about Wikileaks, but all websites deemed objectionable by the government. Remember the original motive behind such laws: protecting children online.
Shouldn't there be some kind of due process to ensure that this power is not abused for censorship? Are there any organizations in Australia that fight against this law? It's a bit scary to see a developed nation implementing measures inspired by China.
Easily circumvented; just link to a site that links to WikiLeaks. If many thousands of such sites appear, the government won't be able to keep up with them.
EDIT: And if they try to outlaw the transitive closure of sites that link to WikiLeaks, they'll probably soon find that's most of the Web.
Aussie here, I have access to wikileaks.org right now from my Sydney-based ISP. There is no internet censorship in Australia as the idea is politically dead for now.
Yes, it wikileaks was added to a blacklist, one that is used by government employees at work. Basically no one uses that list.
Submitter 'mcantelon' needs some banhammer for fake stories.
The article says it's on the ACMA blacklist, and if you link to a site on the blacklist from an Australian website then you are eligible to be fined. Whether anyone has since been fined for leaking to Wikileaks, I don't know.
If/when our abomination of an internet filter idea comes in, then it will become blocked by the filter. I think 2013 is the soonest anyone thinks that will happen.
The filter isn't mandatory at this time, I think some ISP's are either test running it or have done so in the past. It may not actually happen, at least for the next 3 years, it may not pass if they reintroduce the legislation.
"Currently, the ACMA list of prohibited URLs that is notified to accredited filter providers does not contain any URLs within the Wikileaks website," the ACMA told ZDNet Australia in a statement. "Since April 2010, the ACMA has investigated two complaints about specific pages of content on the Wikileaks website, which both resolved to content found to be not prohibited."
The fine for linking to Wikileaks made me lol. And what if there isn't a link, one can do a Google Search and find the WikiLeaks website. It's not necessary that you make a link to the website, so you can access it. Second, people won't probably read Wikileaks directly but analysis and summaries by newspapers and blogs.
This article is from March 2009. I haven't heard of a single fine being issued for this.
As a side note the internet filter mentioned in the article never received enough votes and the government minister in charge of the program conceded that it likely never will.
>While Australia's list of blacklisted sites currently stands at 1,370, the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that that list could increase to around 10,000 sites – most of which are of illegal pornographic content, but could also includes sites that house incendiary political discussions.
yep. WikiLeaks is like a political pornography - in the sense that everybody knows about and does "it", yet it is a "bad" thing to publish details of "it".
Australia: sigh. I used to think that a nation originally populated by England's criminals would be less likely to initiate stupid police actions like this than it seems to be -- but that was naive thinking on my part.
Australia is one of the few so-called "good guy" Western/democratic countries that seems to be out-creepy-ifying the USA lately. And that's hard to do.
