Because most people are stupid. Well, that’s the inference I get from Senator Conroy’s response to my comment on the governments website.

Some while back the government opened their pathetic excuse for a blog where people could respond to the ISP Filtering debacle [side note: there are now 768 comments on his ‘blog’, I wonder how many others Conroy responded to?) . I left two comments and Senator Conroy has responded to one of them.

Whatever happened to parents being responsible for what their children view? The government has already provided a PC based filtering system, which only about 3% of households took up. Which, to me, just goes to show most parents don’t care about filtering anyway.

Posted by OzAtheist / 10 Dec 2008 10:21am / Permalink

Conroy’s response:

The previous Government’s Protecting Australian Families Online strategy focused on providing families with PC-level filtering software. However, despite an $84.8 million government program and $15.5 million in advertising, only about two per cent of households with dependent children are using a filter. Unfortunately, many parents do not have the technical skills or knowledge to install and manage PC-level filters. ISP-level filtering could provide important protection for those families with limited technical expertise.

We understand that ISP filtering is not a ’silver bullet’ for this purpose. However, in conjunction with the Government’s numerous other initiatives in this area, we believe it can make an important contribution to protecting children online.

Stephen Conroy

Which I think is a cop out. It is obvious that parents are just not bothered with filtering, they are too stupid or both. Either way filtering everyone is hardly an appropriate response.

The government has already spent  over $100M on previous filters that have proved a complete flop, why spend more? Are the children really in that much trouble on the net? From some reports in the media, chat programs such as messenger pose more of a threat than children just accidently stumbling upon porn on the net. From what I’ve heard Conroy’s filter won’t protect children on chat programs. Really why is he bothering?

Interesting Conroy’s own admission that the filtering is “not a ‘silver bullet’”, this is a bit of a departure from early statements he made.

Hat Tip to Sean for finding the response, and letting me know about it via twitter. What you aren’t on twitter?