Placing censorship of Australian Internet on the backburner is a feint not a backdown by Rudd Government

Remember John Howard's very carefully crafted weasel words in 1996 about the possibility of his Coalition government introducing a goods and services tax in Australia?
Howard introduced GST legislation hot on the heels of the 1998 federal election didn't he?
After introducing a GST policy cloaked in the mantle of taxation reform in the lead up to that election, it subsequently took him less than four month to get 17 GST bills through the House of Representatives.

Well Prime Minister Rudd and Communications Minister Conroy have further refined lying to the electorate in an election year by attempting to disguise ongoing policy by seemingly placing it on the backburner while continuing to progress the same outside of public scrutiny.

Rather unobtrusively Conroy has been dragging his feet on presenting the federal parliament with legislation introducing mandatory national ISP-level filtering of the Australian Internet - thus leaving the policy in play but not at the forefront of the national election debate.

Should Labor be returned to government the way is then open for Rudd's authoritarian right-wingers to claim that the people gave Labor a mandate to introduce this information technology censorship.
Presumably argued on the basis that a vote for Labor covered every single one of its policies, even those it was attempting to camouflage because of sustained opposition from a significant numbers of Internet users.

As for Conroy's assertions that policy consultation is transparent or that filter circumvention will not become an offence under law - well I'd take that with a grain of salt.

While his claim that the intention is merely to block unlawful content or content ACMA deems refused classification can be seen to be by all to be a flat out falsehood, given information in North Coast Voices on 5 March 2010 and Delimiter on 9 February 2010 concerning filtering of senators' Internet access. Websites ranging from an online gay newspaper to political comment in the mainstream media are currently filtered out.

Delimiter on the current censorhip debacle.