Although the party responsible for pushing the filter forward, the “Family First” party, has good intentions – filtering internet at the ISP level is not a sound way to achieve an agenda in a (supposedly) free society.  However, since guns are banned in Australia, it is not very suprising.

The filter would mandate blockage of all illegal content, including drug related sites and child pornography.  The filter could also optionally block all pornography.

The problem seems to be that lawmakers can’t decide on what is “illegal”, since some of the content that would be blocked is currently legal to view in Australia.

I’m know that the Family First party in Australia has good intentions, but they ought to take a hint from the U.S. that beaurocracy can never achieve anything with the same level of efficiency as the private sector.  Why make the internet 20-75% slower and have a mandated filter, rather than buying a $50 piece of software that can do the same thing?

Someone needs to tell Steve Fielding about Net Nanny.

I’m sure that the government could even issue vouchers to get the software for every citizen and it would still be cheaper (especially in the long run) than implementing a government mandated, ISP level internet filter.