If you have the guts to post one of the hyperlinks on Australia’s banned list, the Australian communications regulator says they will fine you AU$11,000.  Wikileaks, whom the Australian communications regulator hates so much, has several pages of their site listed due to Australia being unhappy with them for posting Denmark’s banned sites list.

The move by the Australian Communications and Media Authority comes after it threatened the host of online broadband discussion forum Whirlpool last week with a $11,000-a-day fine over a link published in its forum to another page blacklisted by ACMA – an anti-abortion website.

Online civil liberties campaigners have seized on the move by ACMA as evidence of how casually the regulator adds to its list of blacklisted sites. It also confirmed fears that the scope of the Government’s censorship plan could easily be expanded to encompass sites that are not illegal.

“The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship,” Wikileaks said on its website in response to the ACMA ban.

The site has also published Thailand’s internet censorship list and noted that, in both the Thai and Danish cases, the scope of the blacklist had been rapidly expanded from child porn to other material including political discussions.

Here again, we have sites being added to the blacklists that should not be and the public isn’t supposed to know what sites are blacklisted.  It is commonly known that this type of censorship is begun by claiming to be “saving the children,” but it quickly descends to stifle free speech and anything else a government doesn’t want its people to talk of or be informed about.   Australian Christian Lobby, Jim Wallace, has already stated, on the record, that he hopes the porn industry will go broke as a result of the blacklist.  This entire scheme is politically motivated and has little to do with actually protecting the citizens of Australia.

Australia, like many other countries, already have laws to combat child pornography and anything else that is illegal online.  There is no need to have this blacklist to being with.  Child porn is not so rampant that children are being bombarded with it everywhere they turn when they are online.  Child porn and illegal activities online are something that people, including children, have to seek out.  It doesn’t come knocking at your door.