In doing this, our moderate left government is only carrying on what was begun by the moderate right Howard government. There is nobody to support, if you believe in unfettered free speech on the Internet. The bipartisan consensus is against it - and with China.

"Groups including the System Administrators Guild of Australia and Electronic Frontiers Australia have attacked the proposal, saying it would unfairly restrict Australians' access to the web, slow internet speeds and raise the price of internet access."

When I was participating in public protests against the Howard government's legislation on censoring the Internet (which was pretty toothless, but which I and others thought would put us on a slippery slope, which it has, obviously), I took every opportunity to talk to fellow protesters, including the systems admin. guys who were so prominent in the cause for obvious reasons, to suggest to them that we shouldn't only be addressing the immediate problem of this piece of legislation, right now; instead we should be for formal, constitutional protection of freedom of speech, such as Americans have in their Bill of Rights. Everybody, without exception, was out of sympathy with that idea. So I gave up. There is no substantial body of people, even driven by self interest, that is interested to fight for free speech in a principled way.

So I guess we'll slide further down the slippery slope.

This conforms to the usual way rights are lost in a "slippery slope" effect. (Here is an article on how gun rights were lost in the United Kingdom that outlines the general model for losing rights: (link).) In particular, when technology changes the way a traditional right can be exercised, as with the Internet now or with the introduction of revolvers in the United Kingdom, it's thrown into doubt as the new possibilities are examined in the light of the worst and most inflammatory possible abuses - mass shootings with deadly multi-shot revolvers, child porn, whatever. Unless you have a zealous and belligerent lobby objecting to even "reasonable" infringements of the right in the light of new technology and making it taboo to support abridgments of the rights, the tendency is for those who enjoy the right to prove they are reasonable people (not "gun nuts", not addicted to child pornography and so on) by agreeing to reasonable restrictions. These grow and grow and grow, and once you have conceded that there is no fundamental, absolute principle at stake on your side, it is very hard to resist them. (Read The Whole Thing.)

One of the reasons I abhor anti-Americanism is, I think that the magnetism of the principled free speech American model is one of the few things that people who strongly believe in a principled approach to certain freedoms have going for us.