The federal Coalition announced today that it would not support Labor's flawed mandatory ISP filtering policy. Opposition treasury spokesman Joe Hockey said on Thursday a Coalition government would abandon Labor's "flawed" filter policy. The Coalition is set to announce its security policy in the coming days, saying they prefer the onus to be on the parents to decide what their children should have access to, not the government.
The move by the Coalition has been welcomed by the Greens who have been a staunch opponent and voice of reason against the proposed filter since its inception. The current proposal is undergoing a series of reviews and now looks almost certain to be scrapped with little to no chance of it ever passing into legislation should the Greens be able to hold the balance of power after the election.
"The coalition's announcement ... effectively draws the line under the hugely unpopular plan," Greens communications spokesman Senator Scott Ludlam said. "Tonight belongs to the huge number of people who contributed to a tenacious self-organised campaign that stretched from online civil libertarians all the way up to the US Department of State."
The move has also been welcomed by Electronic Frontiers Australia who have been running a vigorous campaign to educate the public on the flaws of Labor's proposal. "We applaud Mr Hockey's announcement that the Liberal Party will vote against Labor's filter," said EFA Chair Colin Jacobs. "The Opposition are very welcome among the ranks of those many organisations and individuals that see the filter as a policy failure."
The policy had never been popular since being announced with the likes of online giants such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all opposing the idea. More recently ISP's Internode and iiNet came out to say they would not support a voluntary introduction of the filter. Saying that the current ACMA blacklist has been thoroughly discredited and there is no peer review process in place for how and what is added to the list.
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