This morning on Radio National, Richard Aedy hosted Mark Newton and Jim Wallace to talk about mandatory ISP filtering.

I found Jim Wallace's comments to be incredibly one-sided and almost completely lacking in rigour. Mark Newton spoke sensibly, but didn't seem to get past Wallace's blustering accusations.

We need a lot more reason in this debate. It has been extremely polarising, and we are now at the point where people on both sides of the argument are relying on fairly preposterous claims. Importantly, we can see here how Wallace is absolutely convinced that the material on the blacklist is only child sexual abuse material, and he completely disregards the admission from Senator Conroy that the blacklist does in fact contain a substantial proportion of material that is rated R18+ and X18+ (65 and 441, respectively, compared to 864 RC URLs, 674 of which involve minors).

Lets aim for a slightly higher standard of debate here. If we are going to reach consensus, the last thing we need is to continue to repeat outdated or incorrect information with such conviction as was displayed this morning. The first one that really grates here is the continued assertion that the ACMA blacklist contains only 'illegal material' with no indication of what that phrase actually means.

I have archived the radio session here: 20090129-RN-MN-JW.ogg (8MB OGG).

Edit: My archive is redundant. Get the official one in mp3 instead.

Edit: Ashley Kyd went to much more trouble and has posted a transcript of the Life Matters' section.