Too much secrecy and misinformation from the Government
There is just too much secrecy, lies and deceit from the Government over this policy. It started out as an election promise to protect children online, requiring ISPs to offer clean feeds to those who wanted them.
Then it morphed into a mandatory blocking of material deemed "inappropriate" or "unwanted" by ACMA (a Government Department) which would include material online that was more then legal to view and own, and even broadcast on TV (material sometimes as low as M15+). There would be a second list of blockable material that you could opt-out of which was aimed more at protecting children, but again, it would be on or blocked by default and you'd have to contact your ISP and say you want access to material that as an adult you have the (implied...) right to access.
Luckily for us Aussies they dropped that idea and moved to only propose to block Refused Classification material, and claimed that was their plan from the beginning (lie). The problem with this is, only a small portion of RC material is actually illegal, most of it is legal to own and view, just not sell and broadcast in Australia. RC doesn't include most Pornography (unless there is even mild spanking, candle wax, peeing, foot worship... things that happen in the bedrooms of Australian adults, which is legal, although I think there is still a law that forbids sodomy in Queensland, I'll have to check up on that...).
RC also doesn't include other material that is not suitable for children, so increasingly the filter is being aimed more at what adults do online, and not about protecting children since they can still access material that may not be age appropriate for them. Add that to the scrapping of NetAlert, the previous Governments free PC Based filter program, and all we've seen from Senator Conroy and the ALP is the Internet getting less safe for children and "Working Families(TM)" if you believe their rhetoric on how dangerous the Internet is.
So to my point, seeing Senator Kate Lundy's blog post "to better achieve the policy goals of protecting children through empowering and educating parents", whether deliberate or not is misleading because by design (unless by design the filtering policy is meant to be a failure) it's goals are not even about protecting children. It’s clear that they want to dictate what adults can and can’t do online, even if the filters can be bypassed in less than a minute, but that’s another story.
If the Government could prove that filtering did work and not with the current trials and reports that would get a student failed if they submit them in an assignment, but real testing, and they limited the blockable material to only material that is illegal in this country (like child porn) and not the include the massive scope of material that is LEGAL that RC currently contains. In this situation it would be harder to argue against, but it would still remain secret and only require a small, quiet legislative change to give the Government greater controls on what is blocked and what isn't so I don't know if I'd even be able to support that.
Especially given how the Minister in charge, Senator Conroy is saying "trust us, we're the Government" while at the same time not release full reports on the trials, lying about the policy and accusing those against the policy of misinforming the public or to the extreme being sympathetic to child pornographers and paedophiles... He, nor any Government can be trusted with that power.
And now the Government are throwing round the idea of logging everything every Australian does online… Please…
If they were serious about protecting children online there would be better education programs, no bullshit red alarm button and at worst a subsidy for parents to purchase their own protection software should they wish to (they’ll never reinstate the free filters since it was the Oppositions policy, and truth be told an expensive failure since the uptake of the filters was miserably low)
Basically, education so parents who didn't grow up online know the true dangers online, not just the sensationalised and inflated claims by the Government, give them the choice to use the tools that can help in the home environment and offer support for those that sadly did not have the adequate protection or education due to the foolish path this Government has taken on ISP filtering under the guise of child protection.