A number of senators whose support could be critical in deciding the fate of the Federal Government’s ISP filtering programme have urged caution on the proposed scheme.

The current balance of power in the Senate means that – if the Federal Opposition choose not to support legislation on the issue – Communications minister Stephen Conroy would need the support of the Australian Greens, as well as independent Senator Nick Xenophon and Family First’s Steve Fielding, in order to get a measure passed. Given shadow communications minister Nick Minchin’s recent assertions that the Opposition was “certainly not” committed to supporting the scheme in Parliament, this could well turn out to be the case.

“I’m more concerned about the scheme after the conversation with Conroy last week than I was before,” commented West Australian Senator Scott Ludlam, the Greens’ spokesman for media and communications, who grilled the minister on the scheme during Senate estimates last Monday.

“It raised a lot more questions than answers... I think what they’re attempting to do is probably technically impossible, and if they did manage to pull it off it would be quite dangerous. So I’m not convinced that there’s actually a need for mandatory content blocking of the kind that they’re talking about... I would rather see those funds going into old-fashioned law enforcement to try and take the really evil stuff offline.”

“Technically, Conroy and [his] people reckon it can be done with no degradation of network speed... there’s a lot of other people who know this stuff very well who think that it really will degrade the speed,” he added. “Obviously that’s a big deal for regional areas where performance is rubbish already.”

SEEKING CLARITY: Ludlam also expressed concern over the government deciding what users could or could not see online, but said that the Greens’ next step would be to seek more clarity on the proposed scheme. “The problem is, they’re being so vague about what they’re attempting that it’s quite difficult to pin them down,” he told CommsDay. “Essentially, we’re in a bit of a ‘watch this space’ position – we need to do a lot more research to try and pin down what it is that they’re actually trying to do.”

South Australian Senator Xenophon echoed the need for further clarification. “I have not yet had a briefing from the Government in relation to this,” he said. “I agree with the proposition that you need to protect children on the internet but I’m just taking a cautious, evidence-based approach... it’s an important issue. We need to get it right.”

“I’ve said that if they were going to introduce filters then they should also introduce them for online gambling,” continued the Senator. “But I need to be satisfied that this would work, that it would be effective, that it wouldn’t throw a spanner in the works in terms of high-speed access, and I just need to see the evidence.”

Earlier in the week, Conroy had reiterated assurances that the Federal Government would be working closely with industry to evaluate an upcoming field trial of the scheme. “The upcoming field pilot of ISP filtering technology will look at a range of filtering solutions, and technical issues, including effectiveness, ease of circumvention, the impact on internet access speeds and cost.” A spokesman for the Minister told CommsDay that the pilot was expected to begin soon.

Petroc Wilton