Australia: Labor’s SECRET Internet Censorship / Snoop LAWS on hold until after August 2010 Federal election “……disclosure of the document uncensored "could be misleading to the public and cause confusion and premature and unnecessary debate".

Australia 2010 :Australia’s “Progressive” Union funded, Australian Labor Party, making sure Australians are protected from information and “unnecessary debate” lest Australians become confused and misled.

No Minister: 90% of web snoop document censored to stop 'premature unnecessary debate'
SMH
BEN GRUBB
July 23, 2010 - 1:32PM
From black list to blacked out. Documents on plans to store web surfing data are heavily censored due to the possibility of 'premature and unnecessary debate'.
The federal government has censored approximately 90 per cent of a secret document outlining its controversial plans to snoop on Australians' web surfing, obtained under freedom of information (FoI) laws, out of fear the document could cause "premature unnecessary debate".
The government has been consulting with the internet industry over the proposal, which would require ISPs to store certain internet activities of all Australians - regardless of whether they have been suspected of wrongdoing - for law-enforcement agencies to access.
All parties to the consultations have been sworn to secrecy.

Industry sources have claimed that the controversial regime could go as far as collecting the individual web browsing history of every Australian internet user, a claim denied by the spokesman for Attorney-General Robert McClelland.
The exact details of the web browsing data the government wants ISPs to collect are contained in the document released to this website under FoI.
The document was handed out to the industry during a secret briefing it held with ISPs in March.
But from the censored document released, it is impossible to know how far the government is planning to take the policy.
The government is hiding the plans from the public and it appears to want to move quickly on industry consultation, asking for participants to respond within only one month after it had held the briefings.
The Attorney-General's Department legal officer, FoI and Privacy Section, Claudia Hernandez, wrote in her decision in releasing the highly censored document that the release of some sections of it "may lead to premature unnecessary debate and could potentially prejudice and impede government decision making".
Hernandez said that the material in question related to information the department was "currently weighing up and evaluating in relation to competing considerations that may have a bearing on a particular course of action or decision".
"More specifically, it is information concerning the development of government policy which has not been finalised, and there is a strong possibility that the policy will be amended prior to public consultation," she wrote.
Further, she said that although she had acknowledged the public's right to "participate in and influence the processes of government decision making and policy formulation ... the premature release of the proposal could, more than likely, create a confusing and misleading impression".
"In addition, as the matters are not settled and proposed recommendations may not necessarily be adopted, release of such documents would not make a valuable contribution to public debate."
Hernandez went further to say that she considered disclosure of the document uncensored "could be misleading to the public and cause confusion and premature and unnecessary debate".
"In my opinion, the public interest factors in favour of release are outweighed by those against," Hernandez said.
The "data retention regime" the government is proposing to implement is similar to that adopted by the European Union after terrorist attacks several years ago.
Greens Communications spokesman Scott Ludlam said the excuse not to release the proposal in full was "extraordinary". Since finding out about the scheme, he has launched a Senate inquiry into it and other issues.
"The idea that its release could cause 'premature' or 'unnecessary' debate is not going to go down well with the thousands of people who have been alarmed by the direction that government is taking," he said in a telephone interview.
"I would really like to know what the government is hiding in this proposal," he said, adding that he hoped that the Attorney-General's Department would be "more forthcoming" about the proposal in the senate inquiry into privacy he pushed for in June.
Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, George Brandis, said the government’s decision to censor the documented showed ‘‘how truly Orwellian this government has become".
"To refuse disclosure of material that had already been circulated among stakeholders, on an issue of intense current political debate on the ground that it might provide unnecessary discussion, shows that the Gillard government has become beyond satire," Brandis said.
Online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia spokesman Colin Jacobs said what was released was "a joke".
"We have to assume the worse," he said. "And that is that the government has been badgering the telcos with very aggressive demands that should worry everybody."
Jacobs said that the onus was now on government to "explain what data they need, what problem it solves and, just as importantly, why it can't be done in an open process".
"The more sensitive the process and the data they want, the more transparent the government needs to be about why it wants that data," he said. "Nobody could argue that public consultation ... would somehow help criminals," he added.
"We have to turn the age-old question back on the government: if you don’t have anything to hide, then you shouldn't be worried about people having insight into the consultation.
"This is a very sensitive and important issue. It raises huge questions about privacy, data security and the burden of increased costs to smaller internet service providers. What really needs to be debated is what particular information they want, because that's where the privacy issue rears its ugly head," he said.
According to one internet industry source, the release of the highly censored document was "illustrative of government's approach to things where they don't want people to know what they're thinking in advance of them getting it ready to package for public consumption".
"And that’s worrying."
The Attorney-General's spokesman declined to comment, referring comment to the department. The department said it had "nothing to add" to the FOI letter it provided.

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Technorati Tags: Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate,George Brandis,Claudia Hernandez,Electronic Frontiers Australia spokesman Colin Jacobs,Australians' web surfing,internet censorship,Goebbels,Julia Gillard,Stephen Conroy,ALP,ACTU.Australia

Australia:Former Labor leader Mark Latham says Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott more honest than Labor PM Julia Gillard

Latham attacks Gillard as fraud
Brendan Nicholson
The Australian
July 22, 2010 12:00AM
FORMER Labor leader Mark Latham last night exploded out of retirement to launch a scathing attack on the government.
He declared Julia Gillard's population policy was a "fraud of the worst order" and her education revolution had achieved nothing.

And Mr Latham suggested that Tony Abbott was more honest than the Prime Minister, a one-time friend of his. Mr Latham told Sky News that Ms Gillard was running a phony population campaign while saying she opposed the idea of a big Australia.
"She's been going on about sustainable population growth," Mr Latham said. "That's been her mantra for the past three or four days. It's an issue that's come out of the blue and she's defining her prime ministership around it.
"Today she said it's not an immigration debate. Where does she think all these people have been coming from in western Sydney? We grow them in our back garden? I mean, for every four people who move to Sydney from other parts of Australia, seven move to Sydney from overseas."
Mr Latham, the former MP for the southwestern Sydney seat of Werriwa, said any serious debate about population had to be about immigration.
"If it's not an immigration debate, it's no debate," he said.
"And I'll tell you what it is, it's a fraud. It's an attempt to con people in western Sydney that she's going to do something about congestion. And I think some smartie in the Labor Party worked out that sending out signals on population would be a proxy for the asylum-seeker and climate change debates. It's clever politics. But it's a fraud . . . of the worst order."
Mr Latham also supports putting a stop to Sydney's expansion and he said the way to do that was to stop moving more people into the western suburbs. He said that as a resident of western Sydney for 45 years, he was aware it was "absolutely chock-a-block".
He also attacked the education achievements at the core of Ms Gillard's push for re-election, saying he's seen no evidence of any education revolution.
Mr Latham then attacked the government's health policy, saying he did not see how putting a different set of bureaucrats in charge of hospital funding would produce a revolutionary result.
He said Ms Gillard was a changed person and suggested Mr Abbott was more honest. "She used to be fairly free-wheeling and open about things," he said.
"She has mastered the art of narrowness in public life."

Technorati Tags: Mark Latham,Tony Abbott,Julia Gillard,Australian Federal Election,ALP,ACTU

Australian Federal Election: Don’t Let Her off the Hook.

Part 1.

Pt.2

Pt.3

Don't let her off the hook

The Australian
July 21, 2010 12:00AM

The Prime Minister needs far greater media scrutiny

WEEK one of the campaign and Julia Gillard is getting away scot-free in some sections of the press. The Labor leader is doing everything by the book. She's the perfect candidate, produced to within an inch of her life with an apparently endless capacity for platitudes and recycled promises. She is, as we report today, " the girl in the bubble" created by her party machine. Many in the Fairfax media and the ABC seem mesmerised by the performance. That may be good news for Labor but it's bad for democracy, bad for the country and bad for the free press.

In March, editor-at-large Paul Kelly wrote about the progressive media's problems in reporting on Tony Abbott, whose "muscular, conservative Christianity" they found offensive. Rather than look at his policies, a Four Corners profile screened at that time focused on the Opposition Leader's religion, reflecting the ABC's dominant ideological mindset that Christianity is a "negative, repressive factor".

One might have thought, given her atheism, that these same journalists would have found it easier to focus on the things that really matter about Ms Gillard. One might have expected that, given she has been in the job for less than four weeks, the Prime Minister would have been under close scrutiny, her policies dissected along with her makeup. Not so. From day one when The Sun-Herald virtually endorsed Ms Gillard on its front page, they have failed to apply the basic rules of reporting to Labor's campaign.

There is no disputing that Mr Abbott has made it easy with his gaffe over industrial relations and his lacklustre start to the campaign. But the problem runs deeper, with the assumption that the conservative side of politics is fair game, while Labor needs not to be challenged too hard.This is not a new phenomenon. Throughout Kevin Rudd's ascendancy and his government, the ABC and Fairfax papers failed to nail his true character or understand what a mess he was in -- inside the party and in the electorate. They ignored the debacles over pink batts and the Building the Education Revolution. They swallowed the idiocy of alcopops, Grocery Choice and Fuel Watch. In short, they had no idea there was trouble at mill.

Now Ms Gillard is positioned as the new broom sweeping away the Rudd detritus. Except that since 2007 she was deputy prime minister and a member of the Kitchen Cabinet, as responsible as Mr Rudd for government decisions. Indeed, it was Ms Gillard who urged the backflip on the emissions trading scheme that helped undo Mr Rudd.

Yet her beliefs, political vision and policies are not being tested by many in the media.

Letting the Prime Minister off the hook does the nation a great disservice. We need to know what she -- and her government -- really stand for. We need to get behind Ms Gillard's carapace of genial certainty and start asking the tough questions about her policies and record. The past few days have shown both leaders are happy to focus on the diminishing horizon of reform. As Alan Mitchell wrote in The Financial Review this week, the Prime Minister is under pressure to mimic the example of former NSW premier Bob Carr and do "as little as possible for as long as possible". It is not good enough, but without more scrutiny, the Prime Minister might just get away with it. Mark Scott at the ABC and Brian McCarthy at Fairfax need to pick up the phone and tell their editors to muscle up and scrutinise both sides of politics.

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