In December last year he lost an appeal against his conviction. The latest news is that he has lodged an application for special leave to appeal to the High Court.

The leaking of the customs report spurred a review by a British aviation expert that confirmed that policing at our major airports was inadequate and dysfunctional. The Howard Government accepted and acted on the recommendations. Many would say that even if Kessing did leak the report (and he has always denied it) he should get a medal, not a conviction. Instead he’s going broke, having spent almost all his superannuation on his defence. Kessing has written to me saying:

I have been advised that the Barrister requires payment of $13,200 21 days in advance of conducting this matter. Please note that this is only to cover arguing the case for Special Leave to Appeal, not the cost of conducting the Appeal, should permission be granted to proceed. I intend to fund this cost but it is the end of my means. In total this case has cost me, apart from almost four years of retirement, nearly my entire Superannuation payment of $72K.”

Kessing has had the support of various commentators, including Janet Albrechtsen  the ABC 
and, of course, Crikey.

He was also the subject of a fundraising appeal by the journalists’ union, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, which raised $40,000 towards his legal costs. Almost half of that amount was contributed by News Limited CEO John Hartigan. 

Yet still it goes on. Kessing says:

“After this i can no longer afford legal representation. I’m reminded of a Letters cartoon that appeared on the day the Fee Disclosure arrived – it showed a prisoner demanding his rights but the jailer is telling him that the lack of rights is saving him legal fees. Very apt. As an example of how the legal costs alone were a cruel & unusual punishment, consider the fact that the NSW Court took over ONE YEAR to supply the Court transcripts to allow me to lodge the appeal to the NSW High Court. This meant that every failed attempt by my solicitor to obtain them cost me money. It is of a piece with the initial behaviour in seeking 8 adjournments before even coming to committal.

The Government that pursued him is gone, but Allan Kessing, guilty or not, is still paying an inordinate penalty.

Following on from my post about the things we need to learn from talk-back radio, I have been contacted by Julie Posetti of the University of Canberra, who with Jacqui Ewart (Griffith Uni) has been researching Australian talkback radio for the past 12 months as part of a federally funded project. You can read about the project here.

The research is based on an examination of 12 stations in four states conducted through discussion groups with callers and listeners as well as interviews with about 30 presenters and producers.: Posetti says the results show that many forms of talkback “defy shock-jockery and its divisive effects.”

The positive shows include talk back on ABS, SBS and community stations, but also commercial shows led by journalism-oriented presenters, she says.

“We’ve also identified the role of talkback as the original form of Citizen Journalism and web 2.0 social media (Facebook and Twitter with voice!) and its capacity to build new, younger audiences through engagement with blogging, online social networking and other tech., spelling a future for radio.”

The research is in the process of being published. You can hear what Posetti told Radio National’s Media Report and SBS here and here.

Posetti says:

“By way of aside, the trigger for this research was the role of talkback in the Cronulla Riots and its place in a culturally diverse society. But when we referenced research on Alan Jones’ role in this context, Department of Immigration bureaucrats connected with the project attempted to ‘censor’ our work Further evidence of the enduring power of Jones and the political significance of talkback, perhaps. But, as our research indicates, he may be a talkback dinosaur and the future of talkback is rich in potential.”

She promises to keep us informed.

I swear there is more to this post than an attempt to drive site traffic with the keyword porn. Or pornography. Or gratuitous sexual references. Or porn.

There is substance to this post.

It is this.

If you use pornography, you are more likely than the average Australian to vote for the Greens, watch the ABC and have a tertiary degree.

Fact.

This is a good moment to remember, I think, that correlation does not equal causation. Getting hot and sweaty over Hustler will not automatically lead you, panting, to Lateline and Bob Brown.

I stumbled across this extraordinary fact while reading the Sydney Papers (as you do). The Sydney Papers is the quarterly periodical of Gerard Henderson’s The Sydney Institute, and is a compilation of the speeches given by the Institute’s guests.*

In this case the speaker was academic journalist Catharine Lumby, who was talking about an Australian Research Council funded survey of porn users, or “porn consumers”, as she calls them. (Personally the phrase “consuming porn” conjures up images on which I would rather not dwell.)

Anyway according to this survey – of 1023 “self selected” porn consumers – a higher proportion of porn consumers than average Australians vote Green, watch the ABC (or no TV at all) and have tertiary degrees.

Hmm. We may need to drop latte sipping as the identifier of choice.

Some other interesting results of Lumby’s research:

• 33 per cent of Australian adults use pornography
• 58 per cent of porn consumers are religious
• Porn consumers are as likely to be Coalition voters as Labor voters

So there you are. Couldn’t resist passing it on.

*If Gerard responds to this post, the correspondence will be published here in full. Something to look forward to.

So says a friend of mine, David Wright, with a strong interest in the internet filtering legislation presently being planned by Minister for Communications Stephen Conroy.

David Wright spends a lot of his time on the Internet. To him I owe my own tentative steps into the world of Internet publishing, as well as my use of social media (hello there fellow Twitterers) , and a great deal of my awareness of how future generations will consume and interact with media content, including journalism.

I think his arguments are worth reading in full. Wright has written in similar terms to Stephen Conroy.

I will let you know if he gets a reply.

David says:

“With more news outlets and people taking notice of the plan for Australia wide filtering of the internet I thought it would be helpful to hear from someone who both understands the goals of this plan and the technical and social problems it will face.

It is a very ambitious plan with a lot at stake. As such it is very complicated so I would like to address only the major points.

For a little background on myself I have been working with computers for over 10 years and am now employed as a systems administrator.

The technology behind the filter is actually very simple and straight forward. Everyone’s internet is run through an ISP (Internet Service Provider) that can control what you can and can’t do with your connection. What Senator Conroy is proposing is a massive list of known bad sites (called a Black list).

So if you try to access any web site your ISP will check it against the bad list. If its not on there, no problem. If it is the ISP will log the attempt and not provide the web page for you. That’s it. Very simple. So what are the problems? It turns out there are many.

For starters it slows everything down. It adds an overlay of complexity to the internet that will adversely affect our already pitifully slow internet. In world rankings of internet speed Australia is falling behind, even if listed by continents we fall third (http://www.speedtest.net/global.php). This is a major problem as almost every business needs high speed internet access.

The counter argument for this is the usual “Please think of the children” which leads into my next point.

It won’t work. There, flat out, it won’t work.

All it would have taken was for Senator Conroy to ask anyone who works in networking or systems and he would get the same answer.

Filtering is a difficult and dangerous game to play, I should know as I have been trying to set it up at my work. The system that is being proposed works on a black list. Who controls what’s on the list? How is it updated? There is no way it will catch everything, there is no way it will be updated fast enough.

But that’s not all; this system will only stop people from accessing the illegal content served through web pages.

It does not stop FTP, where one machine holds the files and sends them to individuals on request.

IT does not stop SMTP (good old email).

IT does not stop P2P (Sending directly from one machine to the other).

It does not stop IM (sending over instant messaging like AOL, ICQ, AIM, etc),

IT does not stop IRC (Inter-relay Chat). Think massive chat rooms which can be created for free instantly.

And that list doesn’t include all the options.

I still haven’t got to the worst part. Let’s say that for some reason the content has to be sourced from web pages. No problem. Set yourself up with a proxy. What that does is send your traffic to a legal webpage say, http://americanproxy.org/, and then that page grabs the illegal stuff and sends it to you.

Since it is coming from a legal site, the filtering won’t catch it. Simple. One Google search for “Free Proxy” will get hundreds of hits. All of about 30 seconds work to permanently get around this filter.

I say it again. Conroy’s plan will not work.

My final, most important point.

This is more important than the fact that it won’t work. More important than the fact that it will slow down the Internet, and make it harder for us to compete in a global marketplace.

It is free speech. This filtering comes in two tiers. One tier is compulsory; it will filter Child Pornography and other (undecided) illegal pages.

The second is an optional component for filtering pornography. An opt in, optional component is fine.

It’s the compulsory filter that is dangerous. In 2004 we passed a law saying we cannot discuss Euthanasia online. Will that be put on the compulsory filter?

What about drug information? Where does it stop? Who decides what is filtered out? The problem with me arguing this is that proponents of this will only stand up and shout “So your in favour of Child Pornography then?” or “Won’t someone think of the Children!?”

This an invalid argument. Instead of debating the issues people claim that if you are against this legislation you must want Child Porn.

The “Won’t someone think of the Children!?” argument is flawed. Since when did parents require the government to help them be parents? This is a condescending stance, tantamount to saying “We don’t think you are being good enough parents”. If parents took an active interest in what their child is doing then a lot of this would be unnecessary.

We should have complete and uncensored access to the internet. Anything illegal online is still illegal and should be handled by the law enforcement agencies.

Once censorship begins we have no real control over where it will go. We might start by filtering child pornography, then it will go to other pornography, then to pages the Government deems distasteful.

The freedoms we have in Australia at the moment are amazing and precious. They are worth fighting for.”