In a budget that contained little joy for the Australian IT industry, the Federal Liberal Government did manage to find $7 million in funding to fund its controversial proposal to censor the Internet.
The additional $7 million in funding will go to the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA), the organisation that will be responsible for administering the new scheme if it passes through the Senate.
The government's scheme proposes that an amendment to the Broadcasting Services Act (BSA) to give the ABA the power to direct ISPs to remove content from their servers should the Authority decide that the material is illegal or offensive. The proposal has been widely criticised in the Internet industry as a technically unfeasible and likely to inhibit the growth of e-commerce in this country.
The proposals are seen by many as a sweetener being offered to conservative Senator Brian Harradine who is a well-known anti-pornography campaigner. Harradine currently holds the balance of power in the Senate and his vote is essential to the government if they wish to pass their GST legislation intact.
The legislation is currently being considered by the Senate, with the Senate Select Committee on Information Technologies having just completed its inquiry into the proposals.
After several weeks of hearings, the committee received 104 submissions and heard 33 witnesses. According to the the Chair of the Committee, Liberal Senator Jeannie Ferris these apparently generated considerable consensus on the issue.
"There was overwhelming support from witnesses that what is regulated offline should also have a regulatory framework online," Ferris stated."There was no evidence presented to the committee that paedophilia or sexually explicit or violent material should be freely available on the Internet."
However, while there may have been consensus regarding the need to regulate online material, both Labor and the Democrats made objections to the government's proposed legislation.
According to Labor's Mark Bishop, the government's proposals will not actually be sufficient to solve the problem and it should look at different options.
'The Commonwealth needs to pursue international arrangements in respect of Internet content an regulation. We suggest that the real solution to the mischief at hand-being end use empowerment-is extensive education and information campaigns for parents and schools in respect of the Internet and end use filter devices.'
The Democrats have released their own minority report on the committee, saying that the bill will result in significant problems for the Australian Internet industry and Internet users.
Addressing the Senate, the Democrat's Natasha Stott Despoja outlined her party's concerns over the bill.
"We want to make it quite clear that we believe the regime envisaged by this bill is both unworkable and undesirable," Stott Despoja remarked. "We have two broad areas of concern with this legislation as it has been presented to the Senate. The first of these relates to the significant technical and operational concerns with the proposal which could render the regime unworkable."
"The second concern relates to undesirable aspects of the legislation. These include the failure to address civil liberties concerning privacy and the freedom of speech and expression, the creation of broad discretions and uncertain law enforcement provisions, the different treatment of material in different media, the almost certain adverse impact on the Internet industry in Australia, the likely impact on the growth of the information economy in Australia, and the failure to address concerns about the likelihood of inappropriate and inadvertent blocking of materials and related issues."
In other budget-related announcements, the government has earmarked $3.4 million to the ABA to assist in the transition to digital broadcasting in this country. The budget also allocated $1.1 million to fund Online Australia year activities.
