Internet
censorship in Australia currently consists of a regulatory regime under
which the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has the
power to enforce content restrictions on Internet content hosted within
Australia, and maintain a "black-list" of overseas websites which is
then provided for use in filtering software.
Since
October 2008, the governing Australian Labor Party has proposed to
extend Internet censorship to a system of mandatory filtering of
overseas websites which are, or potentially would be, "refused
classification" (RC) in Australia. This means that internet service
providers would be required to block access to such content for all
users. As of June 2010, legislation to enact this policy still has not
been drafted. The proposal to introduce mandatory filtering has
generated substantial opposition, with a number of concerns being raised
by opponents and only a few groups strongly supporting the policy. Such
legislation may therefore have difficulty passing through the Senate.
With the announcement made on 5 August 2010 by Joe Hockey that the
Coalition parties will not vote in favour of the policy should the Labor
party be re-elected, it is now virtually impossible for the filtering
scheme to pass through the Senate.
In
November 2010, Department of Broadband, Communications and Digital
Economy (DBCDE) released a document indicating that the earliest date
any new legislation could reach parliament was mid-2013.
Current status (Federal law)
A collection of both federal and state laws apply to Internet content in Australia.
Broadcasting Services Act 1992
The
provisions of Schedule 5 and Schedule 7 of the Broadcasting Services
Act 1992 inserted in 1999 and 2007 allow the Australian Communications
and Media Authority to effectively ban some content from being hosted
within Australia. Under this regime, if a complaint is issued about
material "broadcast" on the Internet the ACMA is allowed to examine the
material under the guidelines for film and video.
The content is deemed to be "prohibited" where it is (or in ACMA's judgement likely would be):
refused classification, or classified X18+
classified R18+, and not protected by an adult verification system
classified MA15+ and not protected by an adult verification system, where the user has paid to access the content.
Where
content is deemed to be prohibited, the ACMA is empowered to issue
local sites with a take-down notice under which the content must be
removed; failure to do so can result in fines of up to $11,000 per day.
If the site is hosted outside Australia, the content in question is
added to a blacklist of banned URLs. This list of banned Web pages is
then added to filtering software (encrypted), which must be offered to
all consumers by their Internet Service Providers. In March 2009, this
blacklist was leaked online.
A
number of take down notices have been issued to some Australian-hosted
websites. According to Electronic Frontiers Australia in at least one
documented case, the hosting was merely shifted to a server in the
United States, and the DNS records updated so that consumers may never
have noticed the change.
Suicide Related Materials Offences Act 2006
In
2006 the Federal Parliament passed the Suicide Related Materials
Offences Act, which makes it illegal to use communications media such as
the Internet to discuss the practical aspects of suicide.
Copyright Legislation Amendment Bill 2004
The
Copyright Legislation Amendment Bill 2004 was passed on 9 December 2004
by the Australian Senate, and extended copyright reform beyond the
Australian-US free trade agreement (FTA). The impact will be felt most
heavily by Internet service providers. The Internet Industry Association
and EFA are actively opposing these efforts.
State and territory laws
Some
state governments have laws that ban the transmission of material
unsuitable for minors. In New South Wales, Internet censorship
legislation was introduced in 2001 which criminalises online material
which is unsuitable for minors. In 2002, the New South Wales Standing
Committee on Social Issues issued a report recommending that the
legislation be repealed, and in response the New South Wales government
stated that the legislation "will be neither commenced nor repealed"
until after the review of the Commonwealth Internet censorship
legislation had been completed.
Notable examples
In
2002, New South Wales Police Minister Michael Costa attempted, without
success, to shut down three protest websites by appealing to the
then-communications minister Richard Alston. The Green Left Weekly
stated these were Melbourne Indymedia and S11 websites, and that the
Australian Broadcasting Authority (the predecessor to ACMA) cleared them
of breaching government regulations on 30 October 2002.
Also
in 2002, and under the terms of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, the
Federal Court ordered Dr Fredrick Töben to remove material from his
Australian website which denied aspects of The Holocaust and vilified
Jews.
In
2006, Richard Neville published a "spoof" website that had a fictional
transcript of John Howard apologising to Australians for the Iraq War.
The website was forcibly taken offline by the government with no
recourse.
After
the devastating bushfires in February 2009, details about an alleged
arsonist were posted online by bloggers. Victorian police deputy
commissioner Kieran Walshe has asked the state Director of Public
Prosecutions to examine the possibility of removing these blogs from the
web, as they might jeopardise any court case.
In
March 2009, after a user posted a link to a site on ACMA's blacklist on
the Whirlpool forum, Whirlpool's service provider, Bulletproof
Networks, was threatened with fines of $11,000 per day if the offending
link was not removed. The same link in an article on EFA's website was
removed in May 2009 after ACMA issued a "link-deletion notice", and the
EFA took the precautionary step of also removing indirect links to the
material in question.
The
2009 winner of the George Polk award for videography shows footage of
26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan being shot and dying during Iran protests.
This footage has also been declared "prohibited content" by ACMA,
attracting fines of $11,000 per day for any Australian website which
posts a link to the video.
After
the Australian government announced plans to mandate web filtering in
Australia in December 2009, an anti-censorship website hosted on
stephenconroy.com.au (The full name of the Minister for Broadband,
Communications and the Digital Economy) was taken offline by auDA after
only 24 hours of being published online.
In
October 2000, Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) attempted under the
Freedom of Information Act (FOI) to obtain documents relating to the
implementation of the web filter. While a few were released, many were
not, and in 2003 new legislation, "Communications Legislation Amendment
Bill (No. 1) 2002", was passed by the Liberal government and four
independents, and opposed by The Greens and the Australian Labor Party.
While the stated reason for the bill was to prevent people accessing
child pornography by examining the blocked sites, this bill exempted
whole documents from FOI, many of which did not reference prohibited
content at all. EFA state that the bill was designed to prevent further
public scrutiny of web filtering proposals.
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