Angus Kidman13 December 2008, 6:38 PM
Protest marches were held around Australia today against the Australian government's internet censorship plans. APC was at the Sydney march, armed with a camera.
Page 2 - Why the Australian Sex Party was at the protest
Unsurprisingly, a lot of the discussion was about sex. Yee noted that media speculation that the regulations "might" affect legal access to adult content were misguided: "This scheme unequivocally prohibits ordinary pornography." If the government was serious about dealing with child pornography issues, Yee said, there was a simple solution: "They should give the $100 million to the AFP child protection unit." That comment got the first of many rounds of applause for the day.
Yee also introduced the other key theme for the day: the dangers inherent in allowing any kind of censorship regime to be established. "Once they've got this system in place, there's nothing to stop them getting other types of content blocked," he said. Hoping that the scheme would be abandoned because of technical concerns was not a sensible approach, he argued: "Moore's Law is on the side of the censors."
The inevitably heavy atmosphere induced by Yee's comments was lightened somewhat when Dave The Happy Singer took to the stage again and performed arguably the only appropriate song for the event: Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up'. "We just Rickroll'd our protest, awesome!" Jerry said.
Next up was Fiona Patten, long-standing adult industry advocate and convenor of the recently launched Australian Sex Party. Patten pointed out that politicians seemed to have somewhat repressed erotic attitudes. "I've never heard a politician say anything positive about sex." She also noted that the proposed 10,000 site list of banned content was not likely to be particularly effective: "I don't know if they've Googled sex recently but I'm afraid there's more than 10,000 results. It's not like this policy is workable in any way. You couldn't think of a dumber way of spending $100 million."