[LINK] Fwd: Just in: Conroy going ahead with censorship

[Stephen Wilson]

Bernard Keane's piece had nothing at all to do with getting public 
servants to *pay attention* to your concerns. Rather, it was expressly 
about how to waste their time. 

I'm not happy with the government's handling of this either.  And I'm 
all for protest in general.  So why not go and picket?  By jamming 
public servants' processes for responding to correspondence, all you'll 
do is piss people off, and you won't  even get any air time on the TV 
news. 

rene wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Dec 2009 13:32:00 +1100, Stephen Wilson wrote:
>
>   
>> Sorry but this is cynical, undergraduate nonsense.
>>
>> If there is any hope at all of engaging the government on the
>> substantive issues (like freedom of speech, or efficacy or whatever)
>> then what good does it do to sabotage public servants' time?  How
>> seriously do you want to be taken?
>>     
>
> If you have been following the efforts of concerned citizens to bring their 
> concerns to the attention of government politicians, then you would know 
> that the overwhelmingly majority who have written polite, considered, 
> detailed letters about the reasons for their opposition to the mandatory 
> blocking plan, have been sent a standard letter from the politician to whom 
> they wrote (or one from Conroy's office) which in the overwhelmingly 
> majority of cases shows that the politician or staff member did not even 
> read what the citizen said.
>
> You may think Bernard Keane's suggestion is "cynical, undergraduate 
> nonsense" but for those members of the public who have been trying, really 
> hard, to get any sort of sensible response from politicians, indicating 
> that the politician or their staff, even actually read the citizen's 
> letter/concerns, then you might understand why Keane is suggesting another 
> means of making politicians and/or their staff *pay attention*.
>
> It is 2 years since the govt announced its plan, and there is minimal 
> evidence to date that the public has been able "engage the government on 
> the substantive issues" notwithstanding a vast amount of letter writing of 
> a type completely different from that which BK has recently suggested.  
>
> Irene
>
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