Another country is testing the waters of liberty infringement as Australia has announced that they are moving towards an online casino filtering system for the entire country.  Citizens are up in arms crying out that their liberty is being infringed upon and that the filtering system will not work.  The government is gearing up towards implementing trials of the new system, and they plan to force Internet providers in the country to begin mandatory censorship of what is being deemed ‘unwanted content’.  The testing is scheduled to begin within the next few days.

The tens of millions of Australian dollars that is being spent on the unwanted filtering system will prevent citizens from accessing child pornography and other ‘grayer’ areas of the Internet.  Online gambling and political discussions are two of the areas that are in the proposed filtering scheme.  Groups from the Greens and the Liberals, the two major opposing political parties in the country are criticizing the censorship in addition to anti-censorship advocates and other parties that have an interest in the online gambling community.

There is already backlash being felt against the government action.  Telstra, the nation’s largest Internet service provider is refusing to participate in the censorship filter’s trial runs.  Additionally there are rumors already running amuck that the Labor Government itself has found that the technology that is going to be implemented is flawed and that a report commissioned by the Labor Government says as much.  The report by the Internet Industry Association states that ‘legitimate sites are frequently blocked while sites that are to be censored are passing through’.  In addition to these flaws, the Internet speeds citizens are used to are being drastically slowed down by the filtering system.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy had promised during his election campaign that citizens would be able to opt out of any filtering plan that would be into place if they did not desire the censors.  However, an additional mandatory tier of filtering has been added to the original concept and a blacklist of websites has already been created by the government but not yet released to the public at large.

Like the UIGEA in the United States, the Australian government is attempting to make lifestyle choices for their citizens that go against everything the ‘free’ country stands for, causing politicians to get involved and fight to give the people what they want as compared to what they don’t want and will reject every time.