Cowboy Confessional

I have enjoyed a life long love affair with Australia, despite having not the opportunity to visit. The people of Oz are warm hearted, and the country sounds like a beach bum paradise. Who could resist white sands, topless women, and a cold oil can of Foster’s?

Which is why watching them sink into a morass of collective stupidity breaks my heart.

I won’t belabor their catastrophic adoption of draconian gun control — the evils therein are self-explanatory. Nor is it necessary to note again a growing, reluctant adoption in Oz of an all controlling nanny state. It is as if the Ausies want to mimic the U.K. by abandoning their original rugged individualism.

So it should not be surprising that the Australian government now wants to censor internet content, as does communist China (a land of human rights suppression), Indonisia (a land of human rights suppression), and Saudi Arabia (a land of human rights suppression).

It is a very small step from censorship to enslavement.

The Sydney Morning Herald carried the following bit of Orwellian newspeak from Stephen Conroy, the Labor Party’s Chief of Human Domestication, in response to the complaints of civil liberties groups:

“If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor Government is going to disagree.”

The fact is nobody made that comparison, but Heir Conroy’s gambit was well played nonetheless. The Oz government plans to mandate that internet service providers install content filtering systems controlled by the Oz government. Evidently the Labor Party believes that Australian citizens are too ignorant to filter their own content, and want to directly control the process through upstream pipes … beyond the control of the end user.

The danger therein is obvious. There is no oversight, monitoring, or correction of the definition of “unsuitable content.” Anyone in China can attest that information critical of the Chinese government (and the internet is heavy with such critique) cannot be found through a browser. Thus the Chinese government maintains and grows its power through the regulation of information, and continues a long and glorious history of oppression.

Now Australia’s Labor Party wants to do the same to its own people.

So goodbye Australia. Where once we were kin who threw off the yoke of the Crown’s domination, you have sadly strapped yourself to government’s plow. We shall miss you.

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