Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When the internet really entered mainstream use in the 1990s, we were told it was the dawn of a new era in civilisation. The grand vision was for a world where information and ideas flowed freely, where national borders were made redundant and where everybody, at least online, would be equal. Unfortunately, Australia has been lagging in the march of the information age. Increasingly, my constituents complain about the lack of quality internet access, and, in what is a relatively affluent and long-established area of a major city, some are told that they cannot have broadband access from their homes at all. As if the woeful state of telecommunications infrastructure was not bad enough, the government is also trying to restrict the very freedom which has made the rise of the internet such a momentous event in human development.

The ‘minister for censorship’—or maybe we should call him the minister for broadband—is asleep at the wheel and the rest of Australia is stuck behind him as he sputters along the information superhighway. High-quality broadband access was a key election promise. Labor promised that the construction of the NBN would commence before the end of 2008. We are still all waiting for answers and we are still all waiting for action. What do I tell my constituents, Minister—just another election promise broken?

Rather than address this, the minister has instead embarked on the campaign to restrict the use of the internet by Australians in a manner more commonly seen in societies such as China and Saudi Arabia. Initially this was put forward as a way to protect children from unsavoury material, in itself an insult to parents who should be quite capable of determining what their own offspring are exposed to without the incursion of a nanny state. But since then we have been told of plans to block more than 10,000 sites, not just to protect children but to shield us all from content which anonymous and effectively unaccountable bureaucrats determine to be undesirable. I say ‘unaccountable’ because the list of blocked sites is to be secret. We are told we should accept the judgement of these bureaucrats, that it is not in our interest to access certain material. I for one do not accept this and I believe that this feeling is shared by many Australians.