The knowledge revolution and Conroy's 'Index'

Or perhaps is it a defect in our national psyche based on our origins as explored by Chris Uhlmann, “Don't ask, don't tell” (whose article on the ABC website is no longer available). He in part wrote:

Australian governments are suspicious of the people and, as far as I can tell, they have been since 1788 ...

The theory is a work in progress but maybe it explains why Australian governments and their bureaucracies obsessively hide information. In 20 years of journalism I have encountered absurd secrecy at all levels of government and it appears to be a bipartisan disposition.

Perhaps Ulhmann's theory on our governments proclivity to secrecy is founded on a sense of deep insecurity, that if the people really knew the caper it was, the politicians would lose their credibility, and then their legitimacy.

Is what they are afraid of, the same fear felt in Iran, China and North Korea?

It is apparent from a long history of blacked out Freedom of Information (FOI) documents, and commercial contracts whose details are not released, that government is afraid of criticism, and in so being, is afraid of the people who they insist must be kept in the dark. So for them, the internet is a threat to their contrived power, to their self legislated self aggrandisment that no black marker can conceal.

It is therefore consistent that a government who exploits democracy only once every three years or so, but otherwise holds it in contempt, should be deeply worried about the free flow of information provided by the internet. This proposal, criticised by the US ambassador to Australia who believes it unnecessary, is a serious departure from western values. Others assert that the filtering aligns us with totalitarian regimes that are afraid of dissent.

In the first information revolution, that heralded the age of reason and then age of enlightenment, the latter whose fine principles of liberty and democracy the Australian government sadly lacks, saw those nations which embraced that revolution become great in many ways. Those that stifled debate and persecuted dissent, spending political capital shoring up the crumbling façade of power, saw their nations decline and stagnate.

The free flow of information is the free flow of creative energy that enriches and enhances a society, giving it the chance to transform itself into something that was before unimagined. To this potential wonder, there is no place for Senator Conroy and his dread dark age vision.