These two videos are from our Adelaide meeting held on January 14th. They show Mark Newton, a leading anti-Internet-censorship campaigner, and Senator Simon Birmingham, a Liberal senator for South Australia, both talking about the campaign to stop Internet censorship.

Mark Newton

Simon Birmingham

This is a report of what was said at Monday’s meeting. Not everything here will be things the organising group agree with, but it’s important that everyone who couldn’t go gets a chance to have their say too. We must let everyone’s voice be heard.

Organisation

We need a wider organisation for other issues as they come up – we’re proposing “Australian Internet Lobby” as a name for that.

We will keep “Stop Internet Censorship” as name for the campaign – this is clearer than “No Clean Feed” or “Open Internet”.

Great Australian Internet Blackout during week 25-29 January 2010

The New Zealand Blackout campaign (against a planned law saying you could have your internet cut off if you were accused of illegal Internet filesharing) was a big success and reached the mainstream media there.

Anything we do with people who agree with us has to be based on going beyond online services like Twitter and talking to people who don’t already agree with us and trying to win them to our point of view.

On the Saturday before that week (Sat Jan 23rd) we will be planning to do roadside stalls in the suburbs promoting our campaign, talking to ordinary people.

Australia Day, January 26th

Protests and rallies have been proposed. We prefer the idea of an informal BBQ which won’t be as confronting. We’re planning to have this at Orleigh Park in West End. It will also be a way for us to get our own supporters motivated.

Main purpose of Australia Day BBQ (and rally we plan to hold in mid-Feb) is to build up our own supporters and set them up to go and meet with others and try to convince them to oppose censorship

General Strategy Discussion:

Two important points that came out of this article by “Liberal hack” Tim Andrews are that we should talk about how this is a Nanny State plan, and also about the taxes it will cost and the costs it will impose on business.

Some of the things discussed included:

• We need to work out what our single key issues are
• We need powerful ideas to convince others to our point of view
• How are we going to make sure ideas in the meeting don’t disappear?
• Specifics on a media/communications strategy

We also need people to:

1. Spread the word about our meetings and events – watch our Facebook group and/or this blog for details
2. Edit the Wiki with campaign ideas
3. Create content for the campaign

If you couldn’t make the meeting please let us know if you have any ideas or want to help out – just leave us a comment.

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.