I think that Clive Hamilton was correct in stating that too much sexuality has been thrust in everyone's faces these days, particularly in the faces of children.

However, I never imagined that Clive Hamilton would have leaped from that understandable position to one that required our rights to access legal adult material and whatever else our Government secretly deemed to be 'unwanted' to be taken away from us and on top of that, in a way that would make the Internet vastly more unwieldy and vastly less efficient.

If mandatory net filtering becomes law, it may well pave the way to effectively abolishing free speech altogether.

I am appalled with Clive Hamilton's stance on censorship and I think it is a terrible shame, because I believe that his book "Growth Fetish" and many of his other ideas still have a lot of merit.

Another book of Clive Hamilton's I would recommend is the now ironically named "Silencing Dissent" of 2007 which he co-edited with Sarah Maddison.

Now it would appear that Hamilton himself may well be helping to bring about the very censorship and the overall repression of dissenting voices that he rightly denounced on the part of the Howard Government.

There was one curious and serious flaw in that book, however. That flaw was in the chapter "The Media" by Helen Ester which focused exclusively on the role of the Howard Government suppressing the flow of information from the Government to the newsmedia and the broader public.

In this chapter the corporate newsmedia, particularly the Murdoch newsmedia, is oddly depicted as being on the side of free speech.

It's as if Helen Ester has taken at face value all the posturing by the Murdoch newsmedia in defence of "Your Right to Know".

In reality, the overwhelming amount of suppression of information is at the hands of the corporate newsmedia themselves (and the ABC as well) who refuse to report such readily available information as parliamentary debates (see "Media contempt for facts in NSW electricity privatisation debate" of 17 Sep 08 at http://candobetter.org/node/765#DebateIgnored). Suppression of information by our governments is minor in comparison.

Also when it suits them, the media refuse to draw the most obvious links between related stories. As an example one day, the Australian will screech and shout about how beneficial population growth and immigration is for the economy (See "Open Door" of 17 May 08 by Paul Kelly at http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/paulkelly/index.php/theaustralian/comments/open_door) and then the next day we read reports of how our water, electricity, road toll, etc. charges are going through the roof to pay for the necessary additional infrastructure for the extra people.

It is now just possible to counter such misinformation on the Internet, but if Clive Hamilton gets his way that avenue could well be closed off to us before much longer.

It would also be interesting to see if he is still as personally opposed to the Murdoch newsmedia as he once was.

Like Clive Hamilton I am not impressed by our highly sexualised media.
But I am concerned that
- Internet filtering is technically not possible without massively reducing internet speeds
- determined and curious children will break through the filter fast
- the banned list is secret, there is no guarantee that euthanasia sites are not filtered out
- the potential to erode free speech far outweighs a Net filters ability to keep curious tech savvy 14 boys safe from the dangers of pornography or bomb making sites

Lol.

Wasn't it Hives Hamilton complaining about suppression etc. in his last column for ONO.

Now we find the intellectual vandal is trying to become the net nanny.

Tim Lambert of Deltoid was recently caught out trying to resuscitate Hives' PR.

Obviously intellectual vandals like Hives and Shiny Lambert like to hang out together. Yuk.

It is good to see someone like Clive Hamilton more concerned about child sexual abuse then curtailing to the pervert industry and those with pathetic ideologies that support it. He is to be applauded by all decent minded Australians.

"The ALP under Rudd is in fact far more moralistic and authoritarian than the Liberals ever were" Steady on there, does this mean you are admitting that JWH was not as bad as you all claimed, culture wars and all that, suppressing free speech - ask David Marr about it?

You have the government you wanted, you all shouted about everything the Liberals (Coalition to some of us) said and did, and you brought in another party.

The ALP can do what it wants since they are so popular. OK, I can live with that, it is a democracy after all. Get over it, if it costs the country bandwidth - well that's what you signed up for isn't it?

Did you not realise, not everyone would get what they wanted?