Bow that Stephen Conroy and Kevin Rudd have confirmed that they’ll be proceeding with an absolute dog of an internet censorship policy, an expensive waste of money that, far from stopping child pornography, will likely make things easier for paedophiles, and cynically waited until the Christmas period to release the unimpressive results of their very limited “trial” – where are the ALP’s biggest critics on the right? Not a word from them that I can see. Copenhagen’s cold in winter, yup. A driver’s cruise control failed, right. William Windsor is “a handsome prince”, okay. But nothing about a very expensive plan to give the government and favoured its lobbyists the power to control the internet? Really? Why not?

Are they afraid that if they held the government to account on this occasion it might antagonise their more fundamentalist readers? Do they genuinely think the filter will help in some mystifying way? (In which case, why aren’t they defending it?) Or are they simply waiting to see what the conservative party says before they tip their hand?

Funny, they’re usually so forthright with their opinions.

UPDATE: Punch has tried to fill the gap with two fatuous efforts defending the filter:

  • Alexandra Carlton once (AS A JOURNALIST) went hunting for child pornography (AS A JOURNALIST) and found some (AS A JOURNALIST) on, you’re not going to believe it, the Internet. Ergo – “anything that will impede our access to child porn is beyond reproach. “Freedoms” be damned”. Who cares if it doesn’t work or will only really be effective in limiting our “freedoms”? Who cares about “freedoms” anyway? If it makes one paedophile go slightly futher underground, then IT WAS WORTH IT.
  • Simon Sharwood blames the “geeks” for not coming up with “a better filter”. Hey, internet users, if you don’t want your access to the internet to be crippled by heavy-handed government censorship, then why don’t YOU develop better tools to help the government cripple the internet even more effectively? (Everyone who uses the internet and cares about freedom is a software engineer, right?) It’s YOUR fault that you haven’t found a way to do something you say is impossible, so we’ll just have to do whatever annoys you the most until you give us what we want.

What puzzles me is why Jim Wallace didn’t have an article ready to go today. After all, Conroy briefed him on it long before the rest of us…