Soapbox

I don’t get political here very often, although there is no doubt I am green at heart.

It recently came to my attention that there is a law in place silencing discussion of the upcoming Tasmanian election by people on blogs and twitter. We’re not allowed to write about them anonymously, or comment on them anonymously. And in this case, anonymous means not having your full name and home address at the bottom of every single post or comment. For clarification, this is the definition of the ambiguous ‘electoral matter’.

This same law recently caused outrage in South Australia – why are we not seeing the same outrage in Tasmania? This law, it’s been in place for SIX YEARS.

Six years.

Of course, this is the first election where the Internet and social media are in heavy use by the voting population and it seems that no one actually knows what the precedent is.

But you tell me, if you’re making comment about our election, do you really want to have to add your full name and home address at the bottom of that comment?

No. Me either.

It’s a safety issue for one.

I don’t see our esteemed Premier, Mr David Bartlett giving out the address where his children live.

Why should I have to?

Don’t worry though, the writs aren’t in place for another 5 days, so for now, I’m safe.

I’m half tempted to write about the election anyway, just because I can.

I should clarify first, before you read the rest of this post, that this is not David Bartlett’s law. He didn’t create it and pass it and he wasn’t Premier when it went through.

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On twitter, I follow a lot of our political leaders and enjoy having the backwards and forwards with the politicians. It’s my opinion that having to answer to us personally on twitter keeps them honest.

However, I clicked over to see what our Premier was up to today and discovered I wasn’t following him anymore.

Strange I thought, and pressed follow.

Oh you can guess what happened next.

Remember, this is our Premier. The leader of our state. The man who makes all the decisions that impact on me personally.

And he blocked me. On twitter.

I thought you had to have a thick skin to get into politics?

Not be a wussy cry baby who worries about twitter and being made accountable.

Now to be fair, I have disagreed with him. The state of the midland highway is atrocious and I wanted him to answer me as to why it was left looking unfinished. I heard nothing from him by the way.

I have questioned his policies, but then, I assumed that as Premier of Tasmania, questioning his policies would be something he was used to.

And yet, he blocked me.

What a sook.

Feel free to tell him what a sook he is if you like.

Heh. Appears my soapbox is getting a bit of work lately. I might just keep it out, just in case.

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So it happened again.

The temperatures soared, the wind picked up and faster than you’d expect, we were surrounded by a thick fog of smoke, unable to see the hills.

As the smoke got thicker, the butterflies in my stomach grew and I brought up the Tas Fire Service (TFS) website to find out where the fires were.

Nothing.

Page cannot be displayed.

I pressed refresh and refresh again, hoping for something, anything, to let me know where the fires are. I’m not in the city, I’m a rural girl and when the smoke starts to hang overhead, I start counting how long it will take to fill up all the water containers on the property. I start thanking my lucky stars that I had water delivered recently and my tanks are still full. I do a quick  walk around and a survey, looking at anything that might be flammable that needs damping down.

So as I pressed refresh on the website and nothing was coming up, I got a little worried. The sky was dark and smoke filled and the sun had gone a blood red, the kind of red you only see in bushfire season.

I grabbed the phone book and hunted for the TSF number. It took me three tries to find it, in my worried state.  In case anyone is wondering, it is under Tasmania Fire Service (not under Tasmanian Fire Service, nor under FIRE! EEEK HELP!).

I rang and spoke to a computer.

Which told me to please see the website for information on fires.

Fine, except the website, had crashed. Again.

This happened last time we had bushfires in the state, a few weeks back. Their site crashed and the public got a touch irate. But you tell me, wouldn’t you think that they would plan for it and FIX IT before the next lot of bad weather?

Eventually I got through to an operator, after being told to instead, check the website THREE times, and he was lovely (kudos to the TFS, whoever is manning your phones always does a brilliant job). The fires were about 35 km to the west of me and the wind was blowing the smoke straight over.

Hanging up, I could breath a little easier, even as I continued to push refresh on the website, eager for any information I could gather. Mobile phone reception out here in rural Tasmania is patchy at best and nonexistant in many places. I can’t pick up any radio stations here and trying to play them through the live streaming on the computer has, in the past, proved to be more static that radio.

It might be that I’m spoiled, living here in my first world country and getting my news delivered up to the second by twitter and online news sites like the ABC.

But you know what? When that blanket of smoke descends on you and you can’t breath for the smell of burning gum trees, I think you could forgive me for wanting up to the second information on what the fires are doing and which direction they are headed.

So to the TFS, thank you for defending our state from bushfires and thank you for manning your phones with people who don’t get exasperated when yet another Tasmanian, rings and asks about the smoke.

But, we’re living in a technological world now, I would think that you could have sorted out any teething problems with the website by now. Your computer on the other end of the phone lines tells you to check the website no less than three times while you’re pushing buttons, trying to get hold of someone to tell you whether you need to sleep with one eye open tonight.

In this day and age of instant information, I don’t think having your website crash at a critical time is acceptable. Buy more bandwidth. Sort out your servers. Pay someone to recode the website better so that you can update it without it going offline.

Because a page cannot be displayed error, when I can smell the gumtrees burning, it’s just not good enough.

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Thankyou to ABC radio for providing information on the fires through twitter.

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The Australian Government, namely Senator Stephen Conroy has given the green light for a ‘Clean Feed’ to be applied to Australian internet.

News posts here, here and here.

In laymens terms, this means that come next August, MANDATORY ISP filtering will occur on all internet.

It’s not up to the Government to say what I can and can’t look at on the internet. I am an adult and so long as my activity isn’t illegal (ch*ld porn) then the Government should have NO RIGHT to filter my internet.

It is up to me to keep my children safe on the net. Not the Government.

See NoCleanFeed for more details and if you agree with me, sign the petition.

SIGN PETITION AGAINST CLEAN FEED.

As a web publisher, this scares me senseless. Officials have admitted that the filtering, while effective against the kind of sites they are wanting to filter (a blacklist, if you will. who knows what exactly they will be deeming ‘not suitable’) there are also plenty of false positives, ie: sites blocked that shouldn’t have been.

Does that mean I could ‘accidentally’ have Sleepless Nights blocked? Or what about you. What happens if your website gets blocked?

I don’t agree with it. It is censorship plain and simple.

Sign the petition against it. Please.

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