Keep our Internet open!

With under 48 hours left in the Australian election campaign, it will soon be time to find out the big questions of who will control the next Government, the next Senate, and the fate of the filtering legislation.

For those yet to make up their mind, and for use for those against censorship to show people in the closing hours of the election, we have prepared a simple scorecare for the major parties you can use. You can find it here.

Don’t forget to use your vote wisely (and definitely don’t vote informally), to help prevent Net censorship in Australia.

The Coalition has just released its alternative to the NBN. While more modest than the ALP’s plan, valued at $6.3 billion, it will improve Australias broadband by providing a fibre backbone to most areas, which would then be available for commercial use.

This scheme, while not as comprehensive as the ALPs, is preferable to Internet censorship, and should pave the way for more upgrading of Australia’s broadband. We continue to applaud the Coalition for standing up to Labor’s Internet censorship scheme.

Super-fast broadband will eventually be implemented anyway. A filter will never be removed.

Official Policy Document

You would obviously expect an organization like the Australian Christian Lobby to have enmity with parties like ASP and the Secular Party. However the ACL’s biggest enemy of the election appears to be the Greens. In this article, Jim Wallace has no less than four anti-Green paragraphs.

WikiLeaks exposes not only the selfish disregard that these ideologues have for other people but the inherent contradictions in their worldview. Nowhere is this more evident than with the Greens. Here is a party whose philosophical father, Peter Singer, clearly places the rights of animals above the rights of children, but at the same time endorses sex with animals, which presumably are robbed of any right of consent.

They are attempting to liberalise the distribution of pornography and laws on prostitution in Australian states, while at the same time claiming they are a party that champions the rights of women, whom these things both exploit and demean. They admit no contradiction in a stated concern for refugees, while supporting prostitution, which creates the demand for the sex trafficking that ruins the lives of so many vulnerable people in the same or similar situations.

The Greens promote a facade of concern for children in advancing the initiative of having a children’s commissioner, but at the same time have championed the adoption of children by two men, and have led the charge on late-term abortion, which in just one state, in 2007, left 52 babies born alive after the procedure to die alone.

The Greens are always first to criticise the government for relying more on a military solution and not enough on building confidence with Afghans, but whatever scrambling they do to limit the political damage now, they would have enthusiastically endorsed WikiLeaks’ action in subscribing to the absolute primacy of free speech. This is by no means meant to suggest the Greens were responsible for what happened, but it highlights the consequences of a rigid commitment to unlicensed freedom.

It is interesting that the ACL should be so strongly against the Greens when parties like ASP and the Secular Party are out there. Is it because the Greens have the best chance of getting elected, and want to see some balance in the political system as opposed to constant Christian influence.

What do you think? Tell us in the comments…