Mr Joe Hockey, Australia’s Federal Shadow Treasurer, said yesterday that a Coalition government would abandon the present government’s mandatory internet filter plan and instead go back to the Howard government policy of offering free end-user filters to parents.

Shadow Minister for Communications, Tony Smith, added that a mandatory ISP-level filter scheme “would not be workable or effective”. 

A well-heeled lobby has been spreading myths about how:

(1) ISP-filtering would unacceptably slow broadband reception

(2) ISP-filtering would convert Australia into a police state where freedom of speech will disappear.

Many experts say that myth number (1) simply isn’t true.

Myth (2) could only apply if we stupidly let it happen.

* * *

The above arguments are, in fact, not the point.

The point is that if porn, advocacy of violence, crime, suicide etc. endangers vulnerable net users, including children, we must use ALL possible methods to eliminate it.

The Coalition arguments insult our intelligence.

Government policy is not merely to filter at ISP level, but also to encourage parents to do their bit, plus additional funding for Police to intercept peer-to-peer exchange of illegal material and to apprehend offenders, plus extending filtering to offshore-sourced content as well as domestically-hosted content.

* * *

The Coalition is turning a blind eye to reality.

Australia’s children are increasingly not safe — they face increasingly the likelihood of being exterminated or sexually exploited or recruited into perverse lifestyles . . . .

The Australian Crime Commission reports escalating sexual exploitation of little children by older children.

The Greens Party advocates putting adoptable children in the care of pairs of homosexual men.

Greens (and many Labor MPs) favour late-term abortion — children old enough to be born alive, needing only to be delivered intact, dismembered in the mother’s birth canal.

* * *

The ALP is showing common sense on the internet-filter issue.

The Coalition merits only our disgust.

Many thinking voters are looking out for morally-OK independents to vote for and — in the Senate — will perhaps support smaller parties such as the DLP, Christian Democratic or Family First.

Australia’s Prime Minister is refusing to declare a policy on “climate change”

She is proposing instead a plan to create a 150-member “Citizens’ Assembly” of rank-and-file Australians to decide . . . .

Well not exactly to decide . . . .

Didn’t she also say, “The role of this Citizens’ Assembly will not be to become the final arbiter or judge of consensus, but to provide an indication to the nation of the progress of community consensus etc. etc. ”?

So apart from “assembling” what is this “assembly” supposed to do?

In fact, their role in the government’s plans won’t even include a necessity for them to assemble.

Their function is to be something democratic-sounding to “respectable-ise” the governing party’s determination to perch on the fence about this issue until the election is over.

* * *

The Assembly is to consist of volunteers selected through census data and electoral rolls by “an independent authority”.

Sounds democratic?

Only if you say it fast and don’t think about it.

Especially don’t think back to Mr Rudd’s “2020 Summit”. How democratic was that?

Out of 1000 Summit delegates, just one voted against Australia becoming a Republic.

Nobody could even pretend that only 0.1 percent of ordinary Australians were at that time anti-republic.

That Summit was a scam and a sham – far from democratic.

* * *

Is democracy so important to strive after, anyway?

Doesn’t democracy mean putting the nation’s leader-selection into the hands of a population of TV-watchers – whose decisions merelyreflect what the owners of the media tell them is best.

The media don’t address issues on a rational basis. Their every decision is a commercial decision.

* * *

The Church, on the other hand, could and should think things out on a rational, God-related basis.

Every Sunday, priests address millions of Australians in churches. 

Do they speak on moral issues with a unified voice, based on the Faith, un-influenced by popularity with the media or anybody else?

If they did, the nation would change in a big way and in a hurry.

But at present there is too much division, desire to be “relevant” etc.

So the media is able to pick out a “liberal” priest here and a “conservative” priest there — and to represent the Church’s position as being whatever they choose.

Some church groups were in the media last week criticising Prime Minister Julia Gillard over her proposed East Timor processing facility for asylum seekers.

For example Saint Vincent de Paul Society chief executive, Dr John Falzon, was “disappointed” and called it “a missed opportunity to genuinely move forward”.

* * *

Saint Vincent de Paul, a 17th century Roman Catholic priest, founded groups within the Church to cater for the physical and spiritual needs of the poor in France.

This year happens to be the 350^th anniversary of his death in 1660.

Today, July 19, happens to be his official feast day.

* * *

These days, the only messages from the Saint Vincent de Paul Society reaching the public seem to be political opinions, like the above.

Yet St Vincent’s personal emphasis was never primarily political, but always spiritual.

Here are some of his sayings addressed to his workers:

* You are servants of the poor, to be always smiling and good-humoured.  The poor are your masters, sensitive and exacting masters, you will discover.  The uglier and the dirtier they are — the more unjust and insulting — the more love you must give them. 

* We must love our neighbor as a being made in the image of God and as an object of His love.

* However great the work that God may achieve by an individual, he must not indulge in self-satisfaction — but rather be all the more humbled, seeing himself merely as a tool which God has made use of.

* * *

St Vincent was a true saint.

His greatest wish for all people was they should find salvation through Jesus Christ and his Catholic Church.

The Society bearing his name today does a lot of good. It will do even more good by remaining behind the scenes ministering to the poor and needy — leaving political theorising and telling the government its job to somebody else.

The world is full of would-be political experts.

It is short, however, of those able to offer both physical compassion and the saving message of the Gospel.

Melbourne’s Catholic Archbishop, Denis Hart, has prepared a letter of apology for crimes of sexual abuse by clergy.

He refers to the acts as ”crimes”, and “a grave evil”.

He makes it clear that the majority of cases happened at least 30 years ago.

He attributes the reduction since then to systems set up in the 1990’s to weed out suspect applicants for priesthood.

* * *

The Age newspaper cannot, however, mention the Archbishop’s apology without commenting that the hierarchy has “finally” recognised how much damage has been done, and that this response had to be “dragged” from the Church.

Which could well be true.

* * *

What would also be handy would be to “finally” get an admission “dragged” out of the media, like The Age – but not just The Age – conceding that they do infinitely more harm than does the Church in demoralising the young.

Tireless, relentless, never-ending mockery of traditional marriage, of faithfuless to marriage, of fatherhood and of family loyalties, has produced its inevitable results – both of them intended.

One: the people owning the media becoming very rich.

Two: a generation of consumer-addict young people considering immodesty normal, chastity before marriage ridiculous, respect for and obedience to one’s elders etc. uncool and unthinkable.

Do I exaggerate?

Ask your family GP.

Of all his/her patients complaining of past sexual abuse, what proportion was at the hands of – not priests – but ordinary TV-watching, newspaper-reading, celebrity-goggling mum’s boyfriends or other similar extended-family contact?

* * *

A recent American study has reported that during the last 50 years, just over 4 percent of American priests were accused of sexual relations with minors. Just 0.1 percent (one in 1000) were convicted. (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York)

Another similar study found the rate of sexual abuse of students by teachers in schools to be 100 times greater than that by priests. (Professor C. Shakeshaft, Hofstra University, New York Department of Education, Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature, Washington, D.C., 2004)

Occasionally the city of Mildura in Victoria gets into the national news

This week it is Australia’s first locality to switch to digital-only television.

Mildura residents viewing their usual analogue television set today at 9am — unless the thing has got some kind of a box thing on top of it – will suddenly find themselves looking at a blank screen.

The Mayor of Mildura, a bloke called G. Milne, is quoted as saying, “I think we’re going to end up with a better system.”

* * *

Better?

Is he referring to those people who find themselves looking at an empty screen?

Probably not.

He must mean those people watching the same old programs, now viewable with all the technical advantages — whatever they are — of digital imaging.

If so, he is wrong.

Looking at a blank screen would be much better for your brain than watching a flickering neuron-numbing television image broadcast by no matter what signal.

The only thing that could make a “better” system, if you must go on watching television, would be for all sensationalism, violence, greed, immorality, and show-ponying to be weeded out of the programs.

That is not going to happen soon.

The so-called switch-over is no switch-over.

It’s just a strategy for taking your mind off what they are doing to you — and are going to continue to do to you.

* * *

Mao Tse Tung (Mao Zedong), said, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

The television tube is an electron gun . . . pointed at your child’s brain.

Australia’s children are daily exposed to hours of alien values shooting out of that electronic weapon — values incompatible with those of the parents.

Your family’s belief-system is being over-powered by an instrument you chose to install — and are now too weak-minded to throw out.

If a stranger visiting your house swore and committed adultery and did violent acts in front of your children, would you let him stay?

Well, check what is going on in your lounge room at this very moment.

Television, Australian-style, is too dangerous to tolerate in your home. 

Get rid of it.

The other day, ex-AFL football star, Mal Brown, in a speech at an anniversary luncheon, referred to Aboriginal footballers – in the course of an attempted joke – as “cannibals”.

The media have blown his stupidity up into a big deal.

Mr Brown commented, “If the Aboriginal people take exception to it, then for that I am sorry, but when I die they can assess me on what I have done, not what I have said.”

Aboriginal footballers are being quoted saying they are “outraged” and “livid” — and that Mr Brown’s words were “disgraceful” – which, of course, they were.

However, it’s also true that as a coach Mal Brown did a lot for young Aboriginal footballers — many now household names — and they should thank him for that.

Perhaps they will when they realise they’ve been used — again — by the media whose interest in them is getting sensationalist headlines, little else.

* * *

ABC Online’s headline read: “Footballers speak for the ugly racist in us all”

True enough. Everyone tends to favour those like ourselves at the expense of those who seem different.

Aborigines are perhaps just as good (or bad) at this as the rest of us.

I recall an Aboriginal girl patient of mine saying she had decided not to go to the local nightclubs any more. I asked why. She said, “Too many wogs go there.”

The term “indigenous” is, itself, suspect.

Some Aborigines like calling everybody else “non-indigenous”.

Which is unfriendly, and also a lie. The word indigenous comes from two Latin words meaning, literally, “born here”.

I was born here. But some Aborigines resent me enough to imply that I don’t belong here.

* * *

One Aboriginal sports administrator, Paul Briggs, said yesterday, “Aboriginal people are facing the Mal Browns of the world daily . . . we don’t have the low life expectancy and the poor health issues and the poor education issues because of anything other than the social relationship, the cultural relationships and the racism that permeates Australian society.”

That kind of remark helps nobody. It’s unfair to most whites. It encourages resentful, passive, victim-mentality in blacks.

Technicolor over-statements and over-simplifications make good media.

They make fixing real-life problems harder.