Senator ALSTON (Communications, Information Technology and the Arts) (11:03 AM) —The whole issue is that no-one knows. You can look at the latest developments. On several occasions, I have pointed to what groups like Clairview are hoping to achieve. Guessing engines are a quite interesting approach: you do not actually have to visit the particular site and inspect it; rather, you determine the characteristics of transmission flows to a high degree of probability and then visit the site to confirm that it is offensive.

I have no doubt that many people see commercial opportunity in this area. Many states in the US, for example, have been grappling with this issue. There is no shortage of good minds around the world who would see this as a very good opportunity, in terms of not only devices that parents might buy or have in software filtering packages, but also ones that ISPs could cheaply and painlessly apply in a selective manner to accommodate whatever regimes the courts put down.

Someone said to me recently, `You've got to understand that this can cut both ways.' If proxy servers are required to use black lists, there might be a high level of traffic in those black lists because some people have a vested interest in seeking out the black lists, in the same way that a lot more people would probably seek them out to exclude them—in other words, having a clean universe and a closed one.

I think the government is on the right track. If we are technology specific, we will inevitably be out of date and we will then have to change the law. That means coming back to an unworkable Senate each time and having enormous difficulty in achieving what we think is the solution of the moment. It is much better to have a regime that can breathe, with principles that remain constant, and then put the onus on the industry to have codes of practice that require it to pick up the latest technologies against the caveats that we have built into the legislation.

Industry has accepted that for some years. It has just been a question of getting things moving. Not many people have quarrelled with the proposition that industry should take the lead. We have never said that parental education ought to be neglected. We simply say that it is not sufficient in itself because the great majority of parents either will not be touched by those sorts of campaigns or will feel quite uncomfortable with taking action on their own part. They expect the government to put restrictions on people's behaviour in a whole range of other areas if they think it is socially beneficial, and that is the general approach we are taking here.