James Purser [INSERT WITTY CATCHPHRASE HERE]

Hey here's an idea to combat the rash of idiotic facebook page "hacks" (leaving your facebook page open to all is not a hack by the way). Let's set up an Online Content Ombudsman, who shall have the power to... umm... complain to overseas companies.

Um.

Originally suggested by South Australian independent Senator Nick Xenaphon, it's been picked up by the Government to show how "pro-active" they are when it comes to dealing "Teh Evil Interwebs".

Considering that companies like Facebook and MySpace have absolutely zero Australian presence, I don't see how any Ombudsman can have any affect on their operations, unless, and this is a very scary, scary thought. The Ombudsman has the power to attach web sites to the Filter. Anything less than threatening to ban the site within the country is going to have all the persuasive power of a damp tissue.

I would love to be able to sit down with Kevin Rudd and Senator Nick, away from the cameras and explain to them how the internet works. If not me, then please can someone else do it?

Let me ask you a question.

Which is worse:

A minister who oversees an infrastructure programme that relies upon State standards bodies to police the work (building codes being State responsibilities). Under this programme there have been a number of deaths (3) and faulty installations (houses burning down) due to participants not working to minimum standards.

A minister who meets with the head of one of the very large and wealthy companies directly affected by his ministry (whilst on holidays, so not part of his official duties). Soon after this meeting, said minister announces between $250 and $500 million dollars in rebates for the industry (depending on how well said industry performs gross revenue wise).

To be honest I'm not sure which one is worse.

Peter Garrett has been copping a shelacking this week over the three deaths and numerous house fires that have occured as a result of the shoddy work practices of some of those taking part in the Home Insulation Programme (yes it is HIP to be square). Tony Abbott went so far as to accuse Garrett of "industrial manslaughter", a charge normally brought against company directors who knowingly encourage work practices that lead to death in the workplace.

However what no one seems to have been doing is asking the State bodies responsible for policing building and construction practices. It is their direct responsibility to ensure that their rules and regulations are followed, not the federal governments. So while Garrett can legitimately be hauled over the coals for not including regular and random checks and audits (which should have been considered over and above the State requirements), ultimately the responsibility for these tragic events lie with the businesses and State regulatory bodies.

Okay here's a first draft of the letter I'm planning on sending to my local member:

I am writing to you concerning the proposed introduction of a mandatory ISP filtering scheme by the Australian Federal Government.

I have several concerns regarding this scheme, both as an adult and as a parent.

Firstly, while the report released by Senator Conroy on the effectiveness of the Live ISP Filtering trial indicates “!00% Accuracy” with little to no network impact, it also highlights several glaring problems with the Filtering scheme which to my mind render it essentially useless as a tool to prevent the consumption of RC material.

These range from simply changing which servers your computer uses to find out the addresses of web sites, to the utilisation of common technologies which are free and are used every day by hundreds of thousands of people in the course of their work. The report also points out that the filtering scheme cannot filter either chat rooms or peer to peer software.

This leads me to question the validity of spending the proposed $180 million dollars on a scheme which is so full of holes. Would education of parents not be the better option when it comes to protecting children from the dark side of the internet.

During last weeks Broadband Future event the focus was on the future, what changes would the NBN bring to this country, how would it change the delivery of medical services, media production and so on and so forth. People were excited and looking forward to the new challenges.

However during these discussions no one was really willing to tackle the elephant in the room. The Governments proposed mandatory ISP filtering programme. Perhaps we thought that a government that was forward thinking enough to develop the NBN would finally recognise the futility of what they were proposing.

Turns out we were wrong. Yesterday Senator Conroy finally released the report of the Live ISP filtering trial claiming that it proved the claim that it was possible to filter with "100% accuracy" while at the same time offering little to no impact on network performance. Based on this he declared that he was going to move forward with plans to submit legislation to the house to require ISP's to implement the mandatory filtering programme.

Sigh.

There are two problems with the programme that Conroy is proposing:

Suitability For Task:

The report is explicit in declaring that the filtering trial worked only when strict conditions were met.

• The content being filtered was being delivered by HTTP
• The site being filtered was not a high traffic site (apparantly sites such as Youtube will crash the filtering service)
• The user being filtered only uses their ISPs DNS servers

The report is also explicit in declaring that the filtering service cannot filter the following:

As if to prove that the Labor party is as capable of self destructive behaviour on a scale rarely seen as the Liberal party, the NSW Labor party last night threw out Nathan Rees and installed Kristine Keneally, just two weeks after Nathan Rees had requested and recieved extraordinary (for a Labor premier anyway) powers to actually select his own cabinet.

So now we have a State being ruled by its fourth Premier in as many years. It's fair to say that of the past three leaders, the people of NSW have actually managed to elect just one of them.

Sigh, at a time when people are calling out for more participatory democracy, we have a Government that seems to be determined to keep the decision making out of the hands of the voters and firmly within the hands of a small group at the top of the pile.

So now that the Government has the trigger and the ammunition for a Double Dissolution election, what does that mean for the rest of us?

First off let's be clear what a Double Dissolution election actually entails:

• Every seat is vacated, this means everyone is up for election including ALL Senators (whereas in a normal election only half the Senate is up for election).
• This means that the required quota of votes to be elected to the Senate is effectively halved (House of Reps voting remains unchanged).
• Once the election is concluded, then there is a joint sitting of both houses of parliament to vote on the bills that were rejected. This special sitting aggregates the votes of both houses (ie both the House of Reps and Senate votes are added together) to determine the result.

Let's have a look at what this means for each of the players:

Labor:

The Labor party is obviously going to have a lot at stake in the Double Dissolution election, however they have been handed a couple of very good weapons going into the fight. Firstly, the last couple of weeks has shown a Liberal party at war with itself. The election of Tony Abbott will not heal any of the wounds within the party, especially considering his placement firmly within the Howard school of conservative politics. Secondly while people may be wary of anything that looks like a tax, at least the Labor party has the start of a plan to handle climate change, while the Coalition is frantically trying to sort out what exactly it believes in.

Liberals:

Well true to their word, the Coalition has voted down the CPRS for the second time in the Senate and has handed the Government a Double Dissolution trigger.

Politically this is an interesting move. The Liberals have managed to completely muddy the waters with regards to their policy on Climate Change (are they serious about dealing with it? Is climate change scepticism now party policy? Are they just playing to political gain?), while at the same time demonstrating that their party is in no position to be governing itself, let alone the country. This is what they will be bringing to any early election.

To top it off, rather than go with a leader who has positive public profile across a broad base, the Liberals have chosen Tony Abbott, a man who once described himself as the idealogical love child of John Howard and Bronwyn Bishop (thus inflicting a mental imagery on the nation that will take years to scrub away).

There is an ancient Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times". Right now, if the Liberals got any more interesting they would explode.

The latest article about the ongoing train wreck that is the NSW Labor Government only highlights the alternate reality that the so called "Ruling Class" seems to be living in.

The government is now pretty much too broken to be saved I think. It's like watching the final days of the roman empire. Emperor after emperor being deposed with very little done to prevent the barbarians from knocking the door down. I'm pretty sure that unless a miracle happens, the Goths (Lib/Nats) are going to be ransacking Macquarie Street at the next election.

A while ago i registered the domain planetgov20.com so I could have a place to put any Gov20 projects I was working on. It started out as a simple blogroll of Gov20 blogs from around the country and then languished there awaiting new inspiration.

Inspiration came while I was doing some work on openausbot. As I was searching through the OpenAustralia member entries I started to wonder how many Politicians actually blog. So using "Da Powah!" of Drupal I decided to put together Politico Bloggers (also known as #polliebloggers on twitter).

The idea is to create a list of those politicians who run legitimate blogs (that is blogs that aren't blatant PR feeds, have rss feeds and allow commenting). The list would be divided by nation as well as Government level. For the moment it's going to be elected reps rather than Public Service types, however I can see that coming as well.

There's a lot that needs to be done still, but one thing I've learnt already is that there a large number of Federal members who don't actually seem to have a web site, let alone a blog, and that rss feeds are in short supply on those "blogs" that are run.

So if you know of a Pollie Blogger and s/he isn't on the list already then please let us know. At the moment, we're looking at Australia and New Zealand but will soon be expanding out to other nations (possibly the UK, US and Canada and then further afield).

I've put this post in a couple of different categories, because what I'm going to talk about affects so many people.

The term "Clever Country" was a term coined by Bob Hawke waaaay back in the early 90's. Yes I know there are people for whom this is all ancient history given that some of you weren't even born when he said that. While it was politically puffery at its finest it came to symbolise what many of us felt was wrong with the way the Government had been treating the country and its resources. For 109 years now, the federal government has been treating Australia as if the only thing worth supporting is mining, farming and to a much lesser extent, manufacturing (cars especially). Anything based on "new tech" like those new fangled computer thingies was left to the vagaries of a market already dominated by those big Government suppliers.

This continued through the Hawke/Keating years, worsened under the Howard/Costello Government and now the year old Rudd/Swann Government has proven that for them, tech means scary (see the Internet Filtering shambles). This doesn't look like changing any time soon.

There are many things about this that frustrate me.

It frustrates me as a business man. I run a business that is internet based. My business is trying to provide new and innovative services (notice no blatant linking in this post) to areas that can really use it, like Local Government and the Not For Profit sector. However thanks to incredibly high data pricing I'm paying through the nose for hosting in Australia instead of heading to the states. I don't want to head overseas to host my data. I want to support our local industry and I want my Government to ensure there is true competition.