Stephen Conroy, and being churlish about a curious churl's churlish ways with internet filtering ...

(Above: am I imagining things, or does this look like a NSW Labor government railway plan?)

It would be a churlish human bean who failed to celebrate the launch of the building of the national broadband network today.

After all, Senator the Hon Stephen Conroy has felt the need to put out a media release 6,000 km regional broadband backbone for National Broadband Network.

It sounds a wondrous thing. And there's a map! (as above).

Never mind. Allow me to be churlish.

You see, work began on the NBN way back in July, in Tasmania. (here).

How many of the media reporting the news today will add the coda that the work announced today in relation to the NBN is the first to happen on the mainland? So it's just more feel good blather from a government given a daily free kick by the navel-gazing opposition.

Meantime, scroll through the good senator's press releases and the last one to mention internet filtering in its header was released 22 April 2009, Optus to participate in ISP filtering pilot.

But the valiant battler of internet pornography and filth has already admitted receiving the report of the live trial:

A month after admitting to receiving the ISP filtering live trial report, the office of Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has committed to releasing it in "due course".

The report, which details real-world trials of ISP filtering technology in Australia, was delivered by Enex Testlabs to the Department of Communications, Broadband and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) in late October. Back then Conroy said the report would be released "shortly". Today, Conroy's office said it would be released in "due course". (here).

Well I hear around the traps that the report is an embarrassment, and certain forces within the government - the sensible ones - would dearly love to kill off the report and the idea of the filter.

But how to do it? Run the clock down to Christmas Eve, or perhaps Boxing Day? And meantime, gut and fillet the report into blandness?

Electronic Frontiers Australia spokesperson Geordie Guy said he did not know why the government has insisted on vetting the report before releasing it to the public. "We're curious why it needs to be considered by the department separately to public scrutiny. There's no real argument that would explain why they are not transparent about this."

Transparency and Chairman Rudd? Does a vampire like the blood of a virgin?

Of course while the Liberal party has been degutting and filleting itself, its value as an opposition prepared to draw attention to this policy failure is about as useful as Santa trying to climb down the chimney in a modern apartment block. (Well at least that helps our war on Xmas).

As usual maintaining the rage is hard to sustain - the last date in the wiki Internet censorship in Australia takes the story up to September.

But there's one thing I've learnt from watching vampire movies. You need a wooden stake, holy oil, garlic, and lots of skill to kill off a vampire, and likely as not, given that we now have a troika of Christians - Abbott, Rudd and Conroy - in charge of affairs, I'm not convinced the internet filter zombie has been taken out, buried, and incapable of rising from the grave.

If there'd been a decent opposition, Conroy would have been toast, but instead he gets to toast his launch of the mainland NBN.

Because you see the devious Conroy is still up to some curious business. Here's this mysterious release from The Greens last Monday:

The Australian Greens are calling on the Communications Minister Stephen Conroy to explain who else besides the Christian Lobby will be given a background briefing on the net filtering proposal.

"The head of the Australian Christian Lobby, Jim Wallace, met with communications minister Senator Conroy late last week," Greens Spokesperson on Communications, Senator Scott Ludlam said today.

"Mr Wallace says he has not received any information on the trial results, but is reported to have told the Christian Lobby's national conference that he had "found out" enough on the ISP-level filtering trial to believe that ISP-level filtering worked."

"Is the minister only backgrounding supportive stakeholders, or will he also be providing a briefing to some of the many online advocacy and other groups who have been highly sceptical of this proposal?

"There are a great many stakeholders in this net filtering debate, and they have a right to be demand why one group alone has been briefed by the minister.

"We repeat our call for the Minister to be forthcoming with the findings of the trial and release the discussion paper which is already overdue," he concluded. (here).

Yep, Jim Wallace of the fundie ACL. Head off there at the moment, and you get the standard set of nonsense about internet addiction being linked to self-harming among teens. Why, if Christianity was linked to self-harming among teens, could we filter or ban it?

There's no better home for mumbo jumbo on the full to overflowing intertubes than at the ACL website, yet Rudd has done the dance with them, and it seems that they're also heavily pencilled in to Conroy's dance book.

Rudd to the right of us, Abbott to the right of us, Conroy to the right of them, and Jim Wallace to the right of them. Is there anybody left?

Meantime, if you want some further reading, try here. Or here where you can also get a link to the report on the New Zealand net filtering trial.

This issue is still alive. So remember Conroy plus Tiger Woods plus golf club, plus incipient zombie-ism, means that the only answer might be Shaun's strategy of the cricket bat: