Clare Curran, the IT & Communications spokesperson, has confirmed that the Labour Party supports the DIA’s proposed Internet filtering scheme.
This is hardly a great surprise as the initial testing stages were done under the auspices of the Labour government.
Clare goes on to quote/paraphrase David Cunliffe (the Minister at the time):
He also stated that New Zealand had no intention of following Australia’s legislation of mandatory filtering by ISPs. New Zealand’s response to undesirable material has been an emphasis on education, as demonstrated by Netsafe. The Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act had no legislative authority for website filtering, he said.
I find this a bit disappointing, especially when Clare has obviously been doing a lot of thinking around other Internet-related issues such as copyright. I think it might be time to do some thinking around the Internet filtering problem too.