ONE down; two to go. The pet projects of Attorney-General Senator George Brandis that is. His project to get rid of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act fell foul of an usually discriminating Prime Minister who said it was a distraction from the main game. The sub-text was that it was impossible because of Brandis’s hopelessly indefensible comment that people had a right to be bigoted.
Who needs an Opposition?
The other two projects are to make internet service providers (ISPs) enforce copyright on behalf of the multi-nationals who own a vast amount of media, and lastly, to make ISPs retain records of what people are doing on the internet as a counter-terrorism measure.
Brandis is also making such a hash of these that, again, one might ask, who needs an Opposition.
The three projects are linked. The Section 18C project came after a campaign by the right-wing News Corp cheer squad. The copyright project is equally linked to News Corp which would benefit from it immensely. And the copyright project is linked to the terrorism project because they would both require ISPs and telcos to do the policing.
And all three share the common feature of misreading the Australian public’s views. Further, the two ISP policies are both hopelessly impracticable.
This week Brandis got himself into a terrible tangle on Sky News trying to explain exactly what the intelligence services wanted the ISPs to gather and retain so that they could pore over them without a warrant.
His explanation came from the 19th century. They only wanted the metadata, he said. The metadata is like the address on the envelope, not the content of the letter.
He tried to translate this to the internet. The intelligence services only wanted the web addresses, not the content. Sky News’s David Speer’s politely pointed out that they were the same thing. Once you had the web address, you had the content. The internet is not like paper. You cannot keep the envelope and throw the letter away.
Brandis stumbled and stammered. The intelligence agencies only wanted the website address and not the individual places or links within the website that the person visited, he explained.
That, of course, displays a lack of understanding of the internet. Sites link not only to their own pages, but to pages on other sites.
So if that explanation is what Brandis wants, it will be virtually useless to intelligence agencies. If a terrorist starts on the BBC site and then links through via several other sites to a jihadist horror site, it will not be picked up.
Moreover, it will be impossible for the ISPs to filter the information. It will have to be an all or nothing automatic process or be prohibitively expensive.
So expensive, indeed, that if News Corp were a major ISP, the scheme would have to be knocked on the head.
On getting the ISPs to enforce copyright on behalf of the multi-national media owners, Brandis displays an equal lack of understanding. The High Court held in the iinet case that ISPs are not responsible for the copyright breaches of their customers’ through traffic — in the same way that a photocopy-machine manufacturer would not be responsible for customers’ copying copyright material.
Brandis wants the ISPs to monitor whether their customers are downloading copyright material, warn them, and ultimately cut them off and/or report them to copyright owners.
The ISPs object to the cost and to the loss of customers. They argue is should be for the copyright owners to enforce their own copyright.
Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has argued that there would be more sympathy for the copyright owners if they were not so greedy and discriminatory in their pricing policies in Australians.
If the copyright owners made their material available to Australians at a lower price and more quickly, fewer people would engage in illegal downloads.
The trouble is that copyright owners price their movie downloads at prices almost equivalent to DVDs, yet they do not have to provide the physical DVD, run the risk of not selling all of them, or pay for the retailing.
Movie-makers should do what the music industry has done – provide access to everything at a modest monthly fee.
Selling a lot at a small price might be more profitable than selling a little at high prices.
As for TV stuff, the Copyright Act permits copying for later private viewing. An internet download is little different.
In any event, it is difficult to see how the ISPs can be forced to do the monitoring.
Further, there is a self-defeating side-effect to all this discussion. It has advertised the fact that you can get virtually any movie, TV series or music free from bit-torrent sites to a whole lot of people who would otherwise have never known about it.
The quickest fix for the Government on this would be to put Brandis on the backbench where he would have more time to read his taxpayer-provided books, and hand the Attorney-General’s portfolio over to someone who is a sound and talented lawyer has a good understanding of the internet and telecommunications. Guess who?
DOT DOT DOT
THE increase in the size of the ACT Legislative Assembly to five electorates of five members, looks like a self-serving conspiracy between the two major parties, at the expense of the Greens and others.
In a five-member electorate you need 16.6 per cent (one sixth) of the vote after preferences to get a seat – a seemingly big ask for a minor party. Whereas in a seven-member electorate (like the present Molonglo) you only need 12.5 per cent.
But these deals have a habit of unravelling.
The other way to look at it is that a major party needs 50 per cent (three sixths) of the vote after preferences. That is a big ask when the major parties are on the nose.
Sure, it happened in the two five-member electorates last election, but I think that will be an aberration. Normal voting patterns suggest that a large number of rusted on Liberal voters put Labor last no matter what, and vice versa.
It means that a lot of left over vote after each major party has won two seats will go anywhere but the other major party – into the lap of waiting Greens, PUPs, independents and shrapnel parties.
Mercifully, at least we do not have the Senate voting system in the ACT. If we had, there would be a disorderly queue of micro parties taking their chance.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 9 August 2014.