I am so pleased that Australians seem to have awoken to the ineptness of the Rudd government. I was very critical of the Liberal government with its First Home Owners Grant and assorted policies, but Labor falls to new depths of - not simply incompetence - but ethical depravity..... all in the name of ethics. For example:
1. Its Robin Hood-styled policy of redistributing income from the 'wealthy miners' to the poor 'under-superannuated'
2. The proposed internet censorship bill - see
a. “Conroy's internet censorship agenda slammed by tech giants” by Asher Moses, SMH Online, website, March 23, 2010
b. “Google keeps private Wi-Fi data” by Asher Moses, SMH Online, website, 24th May 2010.
c. 'Petulant' Conroy accuses Google of 'single greatest privacy breach' by Asher Moses, SMH Online, website, 25th May 2010.
The problem I have with the censorship laws proposed are that they have the capacity to give the government that capacity to regulate criticism. It is characteristic of Russia's fascist leader Putin...so Rudd must be somewhat envious of his position.
I am reminded of my criticism of an TV3 story in NZ on 'receding glaciers' to the NZ Broadcasting Standards Committee. The idea of Rudd appointing a group of people to regulate what websites we can see strikes me as VERY DANGEROUS to political freedom. It makes you wonder whether these people are so myopic that they can't see the implication of their policies, or whether they simply have some fascist theorists working in their backoffice. In my case, the NZ Broadcasting Standards Committee, which no doubt comprises a group of government-appointed liberals, did not exercise good critical thinking skills, and little respect for standards of scientific evidence.
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Author
Andrew Sheldon
