Senator Stephen Conroy appeared on Four Corners on Monday night to defend his controversial plan to censor Australia's internet. The Minister trotted out his usual series of talking points, though under serious questioning his well rehearsed rhetoric became a little threadbare. The minister's claim that he was taking an "evidence-based approach" to filtering sounded increasingly hollow as it emerged that a policy sold to the electorate as a tool to help parents has silently morphed into an opaque and secretive scheme.

Many revelations about the policy have only come to light thanks to questions by the Greens in Parliament. Yet in the Australian Senate the Minister accused Greens Senator Scott Ludlum of being sympathetic to child pornography merely for questioning him on the details of the secret plan.

Thankfully, in the Senate yesterday afternoon we saw a great speech from Senator Scott (watch here / transcript) that clearly outlined the flaws with the current proposal. As he correctly points out, the filter won’t result in a single prosecution or close down a single illegal website or image from the internet. Labor have now been forced to acknowledge their filter won't help parents or police.

Labor assumes the internet can be run like a giant bookshop and their mantra is all about “harmonisation” with the existing censorship regime. However they conveniently omit that the Australian situation is already a hodge-podge, with the proposed filter doing nothing to address these inconsistencies.

The Greens believe that openness and transparency are critical for a healthy democratic society. A watertight case has not be made that vulnerable Australians will genuinely benefit from internet censorship. Even more worrying is that the proposal would leave the door open for future governments to expand its scope for purely political reasons.

That is why, if elected to the Senate later this year, I look forward to joining my fellow Greens Senators in voting against the government’s flawed proposal for a mandatory internet filter.