Two Brisbane bloggers have posted important articles about the Labor Government’s plans to censor the Internet in the last two days.

First of all, Mike Fitzsimon responded to a pro-censorship article in the Courier-Mail. Mike had a letter to the editor published in response to the article – you can see it at the blog post.

Part of the letter reads:

By supporting Conroy’s solution, you are actually placing children in harm’s way. Parents will let their guard down, thinking “The government is doing my job for me.”

You are also supporting a huge waste of our taxes on something that won’t get one paedophile one meter closer to a courtroom.

A better solution would be parental supervision, aided where necessary by in-home filtering software targeted at the age group of the children.

Conroy (and our Labor government) is harnessing your, no doubt well-intentioned, aim of “protecting children” to build something far worse than a nanny state. It is censorship.

And Sleepydumpling, at her blog, writes about some dangerous assumptions on both sides of the anti-censorship argument:

One worrying thing I am seeing coming out of this is a tendency for there to form a “them and us” mentality around the whole situation. There is an assumption that the people who are for the plan to censor the internet are all “overly moral Christians” and that those who are against it are “internet civil libertarians” or members of the sex industry.

…

For those who are campaigning against the internet censorship, it’s dangerous to be thinking of all of those who are for it, or on the fence about it as either being the enemy, being overly moral, or linking it to their faith.

…

On the other side of the coin, as a Christian, I urge my fellow Christians not to swallow the line that is being sold to them by the Australian government without further investigation. Don’t fall into the trap of believing that this plan is only opposed by those who are protecting their access to pornography, controversial matter or violent games. Don’t fall into the trap of believing that this “filter” kind of censorship is actually going to protect your children, or any other children for that matter, from paedophiles and predators.

I suggest you read both blog posts, and respond either on the blogs or here. If you know of any other posts anti-censorship campaigners should see, please leave a comment. And remember we have a planning meeting tomorrow, Monday January 4th to discuss how to take our anti-censorship campaign out to the suburbs and discuss this issue with people who don’t already agree with us.