Born-again Christians in Australia are fuming that the government has backtracked on an election promise to censor the internet. The Christian lobby has been fighting to censor the internet so that it only reflects right wing Christian views. They wanted sites which did not reflect these views to be unable to be seen in Australia.

The lobby thought it had got its goal when the new government was elected calling for a secret internet blacklist to be installed in every ISP to prevent anything that the government did not like being shown in Australia. The lobby felt that it would be easy to get sites on abortion, sex education, pro-euthanasia and contraception installed on the list without anyone seeing it or complaining. The Australian government said that the list would stop pedophile sites being connected in Australia, but later admitted the list included all sorts of innocent sites that it did not want Australians to see.

When the blacklist was revealed ordinary Australians fumed that the government was taking the Nintendo and politicians started to treat Internet censorship as if it were a rabid dog.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy now says that he will still bring in compulsory ISP-level filters of the Australian Communications and Media Authority's blacklist of prohibited websites. However now he said that the mandatory filters would only block content that has been "refused classification" (RC). This will allow pretty much the status quo with porn, gay and other sites allowed.

This has annoyed the Christian lobby whose managing director, Jim Wallace, wants the Government to introduce legislation forcing internet providers to block adult and pornography material on a mandatory basis, in addition to illegal content. If you want to see porn then you would have to ask your ISP to supply it, but the default settings in Oz should be porn free.

He said that the government promised to make the world wide wibble safe for kiddies and sexually repressed adults who have to spend weeks whipping themselves if they think of a woman's breasts. Wallace thinks the only way to do that is to mandatory block in the first instance pornography and R18+, and then provide an opt-in system. Of course in the long term it also means that the Christians can lobby to have the opt-in system removed for the same reasons that the blacklist exists.

In Australia and New Zealand there is a small but incredibly vocal group of fundamentalist Christians who have attempted some pretty audacious law changes over the years. Fortunately they never get the numbers when it comes to voting for things, otherwise New Zealand and Australia would be very very strange places to live, rather than just strange.

Most ISPs point out that the block list is technically infeasible and easily got around so why waste the cash.