Editorial, The Courier-Mail - Friday, April 16th 1999
The Internet is both a tool and a playground, so the rules which apply to tools and playgrounds should apply to it. Tools require respect. Used recklessly or placed in the wrong hands, they can be dangerous in the extreme. And the rule of the playground has always been that when a game turns nasty, it is time to stop it. Hence the revelation that the controversial gun lobbyist Ron Owen is using his website to reveal the address of a Federal Cabinet member - complete with a photograph of his home and the name of his wife - and inviting site visitors to submit similar material on other senior politicians and public servants comes as disquieting.
Politicians are public figures and hence forfeit to some degree their right to the same level of privacy enjoyed by citizens who have not sought public office. Yet that does not make them fair game for anyone with a grudge or an extreme political agenda. Although the personal information is presented in the :innocent" guise of a government home and garden competition, most casual visitors to the gun lobby Website would click of from it feeling decidedly uneasy, suspecting it of being an incitement to commit a crime. Although civil libertarians would defend Mr Owen's right to continue, the game he is playing has turned nasty and should be stopped. If he chooses not to do so, it is a matter which cries out for police investigation. Australian cannot be allowed to stray down the path of the United States where pro-life lobbyists used the Net to publish the names and addresses of doctors who were performing abortions and then, in a macabre twist which led to a massive compensation pay out, crossed off names as the doctors were murdered.
The Owen case is not the first instance of a disturbing misuse of the Net to come to light in Queensland. One Nation's self-styled Webmaster Scott Balson has taken to using this wondrous new medium to disseminate material which is blatantly anti-Semitic. In any other forum, his unsubstantiated and outrageous charges of Zionist conspiracies would have placed him at risk of prosecution, yet to date the authorities appear to be at a loss as to how to deal with such deeply offensive material when it appears on the Internet.
This is not to suggest nutty beliefs should be policed off the Net. Freedom of speech remains one of the most fundamental and precious rights of all Australians. Yet the laws which prohibit incitement, defamation and vilification on the grounds of race and gender are not and should not be suspended the moment one logs onto the Net. Indeed, they should be more stringently applied because there is no easy way of putting dangerous material out of the reach of young children. Computer literate they might be, yet children still require time to raise their powers of discernment to the level where they are able to sift the legitimate from the disreputable. At present, there are virtually no limits to what can be found on the Net. And that is as worrying as it is exciting.