Explaining Australia’s fall in the RSF World Press Freedom Index

Earlier, Fairfax’s deputy technology editor Ben Grubb, 20, was arrested after reporting on a conference presenter’s alleged hacking at the AUSCert IT security conference.

RSF has also expressed concern for some years at the Federal Government’s determination to introduce an Internet filtering scheme. While it is still unlikely the Australian Government will have the political numbers to introduce its proposed internet filtering scheme, it has persuaded the major telecommunications providers and ISPs to adopt a ‘voluntary’ scheme although they do not need to log or report incidents.

The government has used the review of classification schemes across media as the reason for the delay in its pursuit of a mandatory filter. However, this can be read as a convenient political excuse for its lack of parliamentary numbers to advance its filtering proposal.

All of this has happened against the backdrop of Australia being a rarity among democratic nations in not having freedom of the press or free expression stated explicitly in its Constitution and lacking a Bill of Rights where such freedoms are usually specified.

RSF’s panel weighed this data against that provided from other countries as they compiled the latest World Press Index.

While they have received advice on their methodology from the Statistics Institute of the University of Paris, RSF do not claim the index is a precise scientific measure.

It could never be, given the enormous variables at stake, and has to rely on an element of expert qualitative judgment when making the final determinations of a country’s comparative ranking.

The process centres upon a questionnaire sent to partner organisations (18 freedom of expression groups in all five continents), to its network of 150 correspondents around the world, and to journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists.

The questionnaire features 44 main criteria indicative of the state of press freedom. It asks questions about every kind of violation directly affecting journalists and ‘netizens’ (including murders, imprisonment, physical attacks and threats) and news media (censorship, confiscation of newspaper issues, searches and harassment).

It also measures the level of self-censorship in each country and the ability of the media to investigate and criticise.

Points are allocated to each response in the survey and scale devised by the organisation is then used to give a country score to each questionnaire.

The 179 countries ranked are those for which RSF received completed questionnaires from several sources.