There are many reasons why the proposed mandatory Internet filter in Australia is a joke. One reason is that the government is convinced that adult Australians need a nanny to protect them from offense.

Senator Stephen Conroy recently confirmed that a bureaucrat will decide what material offends you and it will be blocked, because you need to be protected from material rated R 18+, X 18+, or RC. If you don’t want his protection, let him know.

It’s a puzzling aspect of the censorship debate that the government is pushing ahead despite so little public support. Australians do not want censorship. The justification for censorship in spite of public opinion is often that availability of immoral material prompts rape and violent crime. However, that view is not empirically supported:

The results above suggest that potential rapists perceive pornography as a substitute for rape. With the mass market introduction of the world wide web in the late-1990’s, both pecuniary and non-pecuniary prices for pornography fell. The associated decline in rape illustrated in the analysis here is consistent with a theory, such as that in Posner (1994), in which pornography is a complement for masturbation or consensual sex, which are themselves substitutes for rape, making pornography a net substitute for rape.

There is also some interesting empirical evidence showing a drop in violent crime when violent movies are released, presumably because violent people are too busy watching the movies to be violent themselves. And there is this brief summary of research on the effects of violent video games.

Criticism of such research by moralists like Robert Peters (not to be confused with valid criticism and studies showing that such content has some detrimental effects) consists of statements like ‘“Conclusive scientific data” is not necessary’ and ‘Used for the benefit of mankind, the scientific method is a marvelous tool, but it has limitations’. Indeed, the scientific method has never agreed particularly well with Victorian morality, as demonstrated by the Victorian-era anatomical illustration on the left.

And, for the most part, Australians are not afraid of immoral content and its sociological effects.

The results of Whirlpool’s 2008 Australian Broadband Survey show that only 2% of Labour voters supported Labour’s filtering policy. And 90% of respondents indicated that they would opt out of any filter of adult material.

Similarly, the issue that generated the highest number of complaints to the Classification Board was not that violent material slipped through, but that Grand Theft Auto IV had to be toned down to meet Australia’s MA 15+ rating because we do not have an R 18+ rating for games.

The fact is that the previous government’s Net Alert Scheme didn’t fail. People who wanted censorship got it for free. All 26 000 of them.