Censorship really annoys me

I've held out a long time without creating a blog. There is always something else that needs doing, especially with my intermittent and very limited capacity (I'm very ill). But at this point, it's either express my opinion or get a new set of false teeth. I'm grinding this lot way too much. For those of you who actually live in the free world, the Rudd Australian government is trying to push through legislation to censor the Internet. Yes, I said Australia... not China, Burma or Iran. Right here in the "lucky country", our government is once again pushing its sticky fingers into what we read, view and enjoy. Australia has a remarkably inconsistent censorship system, the only observable result of which is that we miss out on things everybody else can access. Ask my adult daughter some time about the difficult of accessing computer games her friends are playing all over the world. Sheesh! Anyway, the so-called clean feed is pretty much the last straw. With no community mandate whatsoever, the Rudd government intends to legislate compulsory ISP-level Internet "filtering" which

• doesn't work
• will significantly slow down your Internet connection
• will not prevent child-abusers from circulating illegal content
• will not protect children from cyber-bullying, identity theft or sexual stalking online

The latter two points make the government's "For the children!" rallying cry sound particularly tinny. If they want to make the Internet safer for kids, it will be much cheaper and more effective to educate kids and parents on the tools they already have available. They could also make a major difference by allotting even a fraction of the censorship bill's costs to our overworked Federal Police, who specialize in trapping child abusers online. Both these measures would have appreciable results. This is a censorship bill, however much the government may try to dramatize and confuse the issue. The proposed legislation violates Article 19 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Australia is a signatory. No other supposedly democratic country tries to censor the Internet like this. Despite our government's odd disinformation on this point, the U.S., U.K. and France have rejected mandatory Internet censorship. So it's just us and some rabidly totalitarian countries, huh? In addition to all of the above, the Rudd government have ignored any and all expert advice given them by ISPs and the Internet industry in general. Actually, you don't have to be an expert to see how technologically inept this "filter" is. Every kid with a mouse or a smartphone knows it won't work. It doesn't handle secure webpages, webpages with logins, email, chat clients, peer-to-peer or any of the multitude of other access methods, but the Rudd government is still determined to spend millions of our taxpayer dollars on it. A five-year old buying lollies at the corner store makes better financial decisions. Really, I'm stuck in deciding whether I'm more outraged by this censorship bill because it's stupid (it won't work), or because it contravenes UDHR Article 19. Decisions, decisions...