Before I mention a bit more about that, I wanted to draw attention to a national online survey being done by the National Association for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (NAPCAN).  It is a key part of a campaign aimed at bringing the reality of child abuse further into the open, to gain more insight into public perceptions about the sensitive issue of child abuse and to provide an opportunity for people to contribute to the development of workable prevention strategies.

It only takes about ten minutes to fill in the survey, so if you’re concerned about the issue, click on the link – they’re trying to get to 50 000 people to do it. They’re up over 11 600 at the moment.

Given the media frenzy regarding Dennis Ferguson, it is ironic that there is still such a need to bring the reality of child abuse out into the open.

It is often pointed out that the vast majority of sexual offenses against children are carried out by family members.  That doesn’t mean we should ignore the minority of other offenders, such as Ferguson. But it does mean we should make sure we’re not just picking on easy targets while ignoring the bigger problem – something spin-focused governments and law and order tub-thumpers are very adept at doing.

Queensland went through the same period of neighbourhood vigilante fervour towards Dennis Ferguson over twelve months ago.  I  wrote a few posts on the topic then. Very little has changed, except that in the interim Ferguson was found not guilty of the charges that he had been facing around that time.

The key point, as made in this Crikey piece is that it

is counter-productive in terms of the rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders. And most importantly it may also militate against progress towards reducing the future incidence and severity of sexual offending.

As virtually everyone quite rightly insists that it is the interests and rights of children that they are most concerned about in these situations, it would be preferable if we focused on what responses are most likely to reduce the risks of further harm to children, not what responses feed our sense of outrage and disgust.  That goes double for political and other community leaders in the media.

Child protection work is amongst the most difficult of fields, but even with that caveat, the dismal state of the child safety systems in most states is a clear sign that perhaps our society doesn’t give as much priority to protecting children as we like to think we do.

Barack Obama not only used many aspects of the internet and SMS to fund raise and deliver his message.  In February, he caused a ripple amongst the mainstream media establishment in the USA during a press conference when he called on a writer from a blog to ask a question. The Huffington Post is certainly a much larger operation than your standard amateur blogger like me, but it is still a blog.

He has continued to engage with social media since taking office, using it not just to reach out to his electorate but also in his messages to the global community.

The important role of Twitter and other internet based communication modes in informing the world about the unrest and brutality in Iran has been widely noted.

Michael Tomaskey, a political writer from The Guardian, writes about President Obama’s latest press conference.

The most remarkable thing (about Obama’s press conference was that the best question – I mean far and away the best question – didn’t come from a journalist.

A journalist conveyed it – Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post. He was called on second. As any political junkie knows, Pitney has been doing a fantastic job over the last several days aggregating hundreds of Tweets from Iran and doing his own original reporting, becoming a real go-to source for people wanting to stay up-to-the-minute on post-election developments.

So Obama called on Pitney and even shot him props for the job he’s been doing. Then Pitney asked not his own question, but a question from an Iranian that he had solicited earlier (through the internet).

The Guardian’s Technology Blog also notes

That wasn’t the only social technology used to spread the message, though: in addition, the White House quickly made a version of Obama’s remarks on Iran – also streamed on Facebook – that had subtitles in Farsi and pushed out the message on Twitter in Farsi too, with a message reading roughly: “President Obama’s remarks in his press conference, with Farsi translation”.

This is not going to turn the media world upside down or deliver world peace overnight.  But it is also much more than just an online gimmick or two in an attempt to look hip. It is clearly an effort to engage with more people, in a more direct way – including people from other countries where the information they receive through their official media is far more distorted.  That can only be a good thing.

We’re a long way short of this in Australia, where dated and meaningless ‘bloggers versus journalists’ rants still abound, and over-defensive people in the mainstream media still try to portray all bloggers as anti-social oddballs, bile-filled ravers, unethical or unreliable (or all four) – serving little purpose other making one wonder whether they’ve looking in a mirror.  And even a well-established and clearly influential online media outlet like Crikey has only been allowed access to the annual Budget lockups in the last couple of years.

While a few people in the government sphere, like Lindsay Tanner, are making genuine efforts to making politics and government more accessible, as a whole there isn’t really the desire to genuinely reach out and engage with people in the way that Obama is clearly trying to do.

There has been some small attention given to the climate change related legislation seeking to implement a carbon pricing mechanism, but even that coverage has mostly been about the politics surrounding the legislation, rather than the content and impacts of the legislation itself.  Meanwhile, many other proposed laws, such as workplace relations or transparency of donations to political parties, get almost completely ignored.

This isn’t about blaming the media – you can’t blame them for providing what people want to hear, and people prefer conflict, scandal and intrigue, rather than policy detail. But we should recognise such firestorms for what they are, and the excuse that such events suck the oxygen out of other issues is no real excuse at all. It is not politicians that determine what gets media attention, although they understandably try to do everything they can to influence that.

It was refreshing (and depressing) to read Ben Eltham’s perspective on the whole matter at New Matilda.

the OzCar debate is not about anything as real as actual policy. It’s not even about integrity. It’s about tactics. In other words, it’s not really about anything substantial at all.

But tactics and the cut-and-thrust of parliamentary attack and counter-attack seems to be what most politicians and political journalists care about in this country. For the media, it’s politics as a football game, complete with armchair coaches and half-time analysis. For both Labor and the Opposition, it seems, this affair is evidence that politics is really about manipulating the political process, rather than about the policies you propose to implement. The result is that in a week when emissions trading legislation is to be finally voted on in the Senate, Australia’s legislature and a large part of its senior public service have been consumed by a circus.

Of course, the emissions trading legislation wasn’t voted on in the Senate this week – it was put off until August. I doubt that bothers the government much. As I’ve noted before, the chances of the government wanting to call an election this year were very slim anyway.

If the legislation is voted down in August, reintroduced in November and finally voted on early next year, it just continues to leave the apparently unresolvable divisions within the Coalition festering. If another vote on the emissions trading legislation happens early next year, the Coalition will no longer be able to use the excuse that they need to see the results of the Copenhagen conference at the end of 2009 before implementing an emissions trading scheme. And whenever that final post-Copenhagen vote happens, it seems inevitable that the Coalition’s position and message will be split between at least two camps, if not more.

That will certainly be worth writing about.

When I first signed on to Twitter over a year ago, I really couldn’t see what possible value it had. A year later, after finally rediscovering the password to my account, I re-engaged and have since find it quite useful at times (and occasionally also disconcerting at the sort of personal information some people readily put out there).

But the flurry of brief updates and links to information / pictures / videos about what might be happening in parts of Iran right now really takes it to another level. It is less detail rich, but far more immediate and easy to disseminate than sites like Facebook, and makes the standard blog seem incredibly ponderous and slow (although Twits which links to valuable blog posts can also be important).

The situation in Iran at present is not something which happens every day (thankfully), but it does show the ever-evolving benefits of social media in giving unvarnished voice to the here and now.

Searching for #iranelection on Twitter will deliver an extraordinary pile of continually updating tweets – hundresd of new ones every ten minutes or so.  Sure, a lot of them are non-Iranian people re-tweeting messages and generally trying to feel like they are part of the action.  Add in the messages which the Iranian regime is now trying to add in as an effort to smokescreen or derail what’s happening, and perhaps it’s not quite as big as it seems.

But there’s no doubt Twitter is providing a key and very immediate mechanism to get information and voices out that would otherwise never be heard. Quite what effect it will all have for Iranians remains to be seen, but anything which helps circumvent censorship and large-scale misinformation should be welcomed.

If you’re on Twitter, follow @Change_for_Iran and look at some of the updates. It’s impossible to be 100% sure of the veracity of some of the updates, but the same can be said for most immediate on-the-ground reporting.

There will obviously be a lot of interest in the contents of the report flowing out of the consultation process, as well as how the government decides to respond to it.

But putting aside the impact of the consultations on future human rights laws and attitudes, it will also be worth examining the effectiveness of the processes used during those consultations.

This has been a far more public consultation process than those usually carried out by or on behalf of governments, and has sought to use a wide variety of processes to engage people.  The effectiveness of the process itself merits some further examination in considering whether other parliamentary and political processes should adopt some of the practices.

The committee carrying out the consultations seems to have gone to great length to engage with ‘ordinary’ people, rather than just the usual suspects.  The terms of reference have been kept brief and clear, and the Committee has also emphasised that submissions can be as short as people like, and in any format that people are comfortable with. My understanding is that the inquiry also has the capacity to receive submissions in a range of different languages.

In terms of open public engagement, one of the more interesting aspects of the consultations has been the attempt to use an open online forum to seek peoples’ views and enable some debate.  This process is part of the government’s trials of online consultation.

I am told it’s the first online discussion forum established by a government department in Australia that is publishing comments in real time without filtering them through a public service legal team first.

In addition, all comments are considered a submission to the wider public consultation on human rights legislation, and people can keep contributing through the online process for an extra two weeks – until June 26.

It is being run through the Open Forum website – “an independent, non-profit, collaborative think-tank built around an interactive discussion website” which seeks to “provide a platform for focused dialogue on Australian public policy and social issues.”

The process allows debate on each of the three core questions which constitute the Terms of Reference of the Inquiry, as well as an extra  discussion page on whether or not Australia should have a Bill of Rights.

As to be expected in any public forum, online or otherwise, many of the contributions are off-topic or targeting people rather than issues and ideas.  But there are also some worthwhile contributions and presumably many more people reading the comments without contributing.
Unfortunately, the discussion on the main introduction page of the online consultation forum kicks off with some off-the-wall attacks by the Atheist Foundation on the whole inquiry, on the basis that it is chaired by a priest who therefore “cannot adjudicate with an impartial mind on matters conflicting with his faith” and is “a biased and inflexible ideologically driven person,” purely on the basis that he has personal religious beliefs.

I’d usually ignore that sort of nonsense, but being an atheist myself, I cringe every time I see people using the atheist label as an excuse to engage in religious vilification.  When comments and responses from some equally fundamentalist Christians start appearing, it quickly feels like the whole idea might not have been such a good one.

But the forum does move on from the ranting to some of the substantive points under consideration.  As well as occasional brief promptings from Frank Brennan, contributions are also brought in from Law Professors George Williams and Tom Campbell to clarify some of the legal terms and concepts.

No doubt there are better ways to use these processes and tools for more effective and meaningful consultation, but for all it’s limitations, I suggest it is far more meaningful and clearly more representative than the standard inquiry processes where submissions are sought from and hearings held with people from a fairly narrow segment of society. These ‘usual suspects’ play a valuable role, but they also can, and in this inquiry no doubt have participated, much the same as usual.  It is the chance to engage with a wider group of people that is the real benefit of online consultation.

Open Forum’s ‘blogger-in-chief’, Sally Rose, says “The National Human Rights Online Consultation is part of the Australian Government’s online consultation trial, so it’s right that it be critically analysed and understood as a learning process.” She also pleads for any ideas about how to much such mechanisms more effective and valuable for all concerned.

I hope time is taken to do that, regardless of the outcome of the debates for or against more legal protection for human rights in Australia.

In addition to the online forum, the Committee has held public consultation meetings in out of the way places such as Weipa, Tennant Creek, Coober Pedy and Geraldton, as well as Aboriginal communities like Yarrabah and Palm Island and outer urban areas such as Penrith and Ipswich which usually get bypassed by such processes.

The Consultation also used a Facebook page, (which they actually kept reasonably up to date!) and Frank Brennan, as Chair of the Consultation, also kept his Facebook page updated with photos and brief reflections (including the occasional quote from a High Court judgement) as he travelled around hearing from the public in many different areas.

The only real annoyance I’ve had with the process was the difficulty in avoiding confusion between these National Human Rights Consultations and the totally separate work continuing to be carried out by the Australian Human Rights Commission.  I think it was a very good idea to keep this consultation process independent and separate from the Commission, but it wasn’t always easy to make the difference clear to people.

It’s hard to know what else they could have to try to engage the community, although any ideas in that regard I’m sure would be welcome.

The renewed censorship will mean blogs and other sources of online information will probably become the main way to access uncensored information out of Fiji. 

Not long after this current coup first occurred, the military attempted to shut down access to anti-government blogs.  No doubt similar efforts will be made now, but at present there is a wide range of blogs providing some information and some vibrant rallying calls. 

The Intelligentsiya blog has been plugging away providing critiques on the military regime since early 2007, not long after the latest coup was initiated. 

In addition to those linked to above, some other examples include:

 Raw Fiji News;
 Discombobulated Bubu;
 Fiji Girl’s Weblog;
 Luvei Viti – Children of Fiji;
 Soli Vakasama;
 Fiji Democracy Now;
 Tears for Fiji;
 Coup Four and a Half.

Some commentary from Australian based blogs and news sites:

- (Apr 16) Charles Penn provides a “Message from Media-Gagged Fiji” at New Matilda

- Jenny Hayward-Jones at The Interpreter examines the possible ramifications for the wider Pacific region if Fiji’s economy continues to deteriorate;

- posts on Club Troppo here and here (including some informative comments);

- This post at Larvatus Prodeo was overly optomistic about the Court ruling that the government was unconstitutional.  The comments thread tracks the trashing of that decision.

- (18/4) Another piece at The Interpreter, this time by Graham Dobell.

- Legal Eagle examines some of the history and legal issues at Skeptic Lawyer.

A lot of the comments from bloggers and twitterers that I have seen thus far seem to be quite positive.  Even though I get about 90% of my information through the Web, I’m not really across all the technology issues. 

Of course one doesn’t have to understand a technology to be able to use it, and as both a user and a follower of policy debates, I have mixed feelings about this announcement.  The decision to provide fibre direct to the household, avoiding the need to use Telstra’s connections to homes, should dodge some significant problems.

I have long believed that investing in the top of the range telecommunications infrastructure is an important pathway to improvements in economic efficiency and opportunity, education and service delivery, especially to regional areas. Getting internet speeds in regional and (some) rural areas which match those in the capital cities will go a long way to making it more feasible for people to move to or stay in regional towns.

However, I am wary that a large scale, long-term project like this may end up being out of date not long after construction of the network is finished.  This article by Peter Martin back in June last year highlighted the risks of large-scale spending on major technological investments.  He uses the example of Canberra’s Black Mountain tower. It was originally built as microwave transmission facility but “Within years of its opening in 1980 it was out of date.”

His view is that “anyone who specifies a particular technology ……  is highly likely to find that it is superceded or made redundant by the time it is built.”

However, while that is a risk, it seems clear that the private market isn’t able to deliver a high speech broadband network with anything like the geographic reach and speed that is proposed with the government’s new plan.

Given that the private sector is not able to construct a similar level of communication infrastructure under the current telecommunications law, it is necessary for the government to step up to the plate.  While there may be some risks in the government’s approach, Australia cannot continue to limp along with the woefully inadequate broadband that most of us have to endure.

ELSEWHERE: Most of the coverage of the plan to date has been very positive, although some are suggesting it may be difficult to raise the suggested amount of money from private investors.  Michelle Grattan says it is “either a stroke of ambitious brilliance or a rash extravagance that might be impossible to implement”.

Meanwhile, the Coalition are in strife again over it, with Nationals’ Leader Warren Truss backing the criticisms made by Malcolm Turnbull and Nick Minchin, while the Nationals’ Senate Leader, Barnaby Joyce, and his colleague Fiona Nash saying it is a good plan similar to one they put forward a few years ago.

More at PollieGraph, John Quiggin and  Larvatus Prodeo.

The organisers had invited a representative from Minister Stephen Conroy’s office without success, but there are similar forums being organised for Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide in coming weeks and they did mention they were expecting someone to put the Minister’s case at the Melbourne event.

I think the case about the expensive ineffectiveness and censorship dangers involved has been more than adequately made.  The fact the Minister had a habit from the earliest days of his proposal of equating opponents to his plan with people who supported child pornography just reinforces my scepticism.

But I do think those of us who rightly oppose his plans need to put as much energy into promoting alternative strategies which will help reduce the danger that does exist from those who seek to use the internet to prey on vulnerable people, including children, who might not be aware of some of the risks.

I loathe portrayals of the internet as some sort of borderless den of infinite iniquities. The fact that there are many ignorant and silly scare campaigns about the Web which are begging to be mocked shouldn’t blind us to the fact that there are some real risks to the unwary or vulnerable from criminal and dangerous activities.

It was good that, after a lot of time spent bagging the dangers of the government’s plans and showing how it won’t address the things it purports to, the question session of the forum did turn to what some effective solutions might be.

The answer given by Greens Senator Scott Ludlam to a question addressing this important part of the debate were clear and to the point. He talked of using an “old fashioned” approach for dealing with the use of new technology for engaging in old fashioned crime. I’d even say he displayed an old fashion, though sadly all too uncommon, common sense approach to the issue.

Some of the resources being wasted on filtering could be devoted to empowerment of the users through education of the risks – particularly through allowing overly open access to contact details and Instant Messaging – while also using funds on beefing up law enforcement to track the criminal activity such as stalking, or distributing and accessing child pornography.

Certainly the fact that there has been a steady stream of state Labor MPs announcing they will retire at the election reinforces the suspiscion an election announcement by the Premier is imminent.  Another sign has been the weekend launch by Premier Anna Bligh of her own Anna4Qld website. 

I don’t greatly care when the election is held and I find election date speculation not only tiresome but futile.  However, regardless of whether it’s called tomorrow or September, I have to agree with Graham Young in saying Anna Bligh’s website is fairly ordinary, at least at this stage. 

I don’t mind stolid, functional websites that give you meaningful information without lots of information.  And obviously I like websites which give readers an opportunity to make their own comments.  But this one seems heavy on spin and catchphrases, little in the way of solid policy detail with policy ‘plans’ that are little more than media releases, Plus it has a ‘blog’ which doesn’t allow people to leave comments. 

No doubt it will still draw traffic and the launch of it generated a reasonable amount of media, which I suppose can be half the aim of these things.  But it’s hard to see how it will shift many votes on it’s own.

ELSEWHERE: Derek Barry at Wooly Days, Mark Bahnisch at LP.