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Things could have been different in 1788

Perhaps if both sides of politics took the time to read the facts http://aph.gov.au/library/pubs/BN/sp/AsylumFacts.htm and stopped going for the lowest common denominator,  this would not be an issue.

Instead we play gutter politics with the most vulnerable, when what we should be doing is educating people.  Yet the problem seems to be that educating takes longer and doesn’t fit the soundbite

Good on @DBCDEgov using the #openinternet tag!

Thats the funny thing about people.  You can’t please them.  Don’t bother, you can’t.  Add politics into the mix, a socially divisive issue and you have yourself a recipe for disaster and nothing more.

Let me get this straight first. I am against the filter, it won’t work, never will, and I will just get around anyway.  My reasons for this are around the fact that all governments of all persuasions would be to tempted by the lure of the vocal minority to secure votes. Sorry but the No Clean Feed People need to be as organised, financially together and focused as the Christian Lobby groups that seem to be pushing this.

Stilgherrian wrote a great piece on The Drum the other day about the Internet Filter.  However if you read the article nice and slow, paying attention to the big words you will notice he was drawing a very clear distinction between the person and the policy.  Yet the vast majority of the comments are about the person.

Now in the last few days a couple of interesting things have happened. Firstly the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy joined twitter @DBCDEgov. My first reaction was “ well that ain’t going to go down well the natives “ and secondly, the people behind that account are going to have be fairly thick skinned.

Didn’t take long (and by long I mean minutes) before the No Clean Feed people were jumping up and down all over that account. Jumping up and down on one policy of a massive portfolio isn’t going to change jack shit. (Or as they say, wake up and smell the cat food).  Then yesterday the Department made a change to the overall timetable of the policy along with a few changes to the possible implementation methodology of the filtering policy.  Then shock horror, to communicate these changes the department very rightly attached the #openinternet hashtag to links to the press release.  Why, because that is what they should have done.  They are trying to communicate a policy to the group that the policy effects.  Yet, the critics quickly said “oh the irony”, “outrage”, “WTF”.

Of course they did, if I was in the Department running that Twitter account, so would have I.  It is no “#budgies” hashtag AKA Budget reply, but a well targeted approach to getting their message out. But no to the “rabble” it was just more petrol on the fire.

One final point.  I see lots of people saying, well I won’t vote for Conroy (people who do not live in Victoria btw and can’t vote for him regardless).  Sure, you can take a single policy approach to an election. Or worse still a single person approach to an election.  But if you think that the Liberals (remember their great filtering software, the one the 14y/o broke in 5 min) will not jump at this kind of policy when it suited them I am afraid you are seriously disillusioned.