Up Front by Emma Hart

Confession time. I was a member of the Labour Party from 1987 until 1989. In '88 and '89 I was the Aorangi Regional Rep on the Labour Youth Council. Despite this (no, not because of it), I have never voted Labour in my life.

This peculiarity is all a matter of timing: I wasn't eligible to vote until 1990. This was no obstacle to my fresh-faced ideology, and it was a hell of an interesting time to be in politics. By the time I started voting, I was less enthusiastic about politics than I had been for years.

I was raised from the time I was six by a Values-voting 'weave your own yoghurt' lefty liberal hippy. (Thanks, Mum.) I was taken on Hiroshima Day marches and smelter and dam protests. We had those Muldoon cartoon calendars in the kitchen. By the time of the '84 election I was clued up, paying attention, and dead enthusiastic. We were finally going to get shot of the bastard.

Labour won. There was the Oxford Union Debate, the Buchanan incident, the Rainbow Warrior bombing. My country and I were becoming teenagers at the same time: lippy, defiant and dead impressed with our own importance.

What happened next was a bit confusing, I have to admit. We'd won, things were supposed to be good. Not quite so many people out of work, a bit more giving a shit about those at the sharp end. Still, someone was bringing some jam some time, best not to worry. I joined the Party through a friend just before the 87 election.

The next couple of years involved several trips to Wellington and a lot of 'mouth shut ears open' for me. I'll admit I got way more out of it than the Party got out of me. Cheers Labour Party, Air New Zealand's blueberries were choice. There was much sitting in student flats listening to Billy Bragg and talking about Nicaragua. This world where people actually cared about ideas seemed a hell of a lot better than what was going on in the rest of my life at the time.

The Council meetings themselves, though - the bickering, the being sent off with the other women to talk about wymyn's issues, the inability to actually effect anything – they were unfreshening my face. It wasn't all waving a bottle at Security and saying you were headed for Jonathan Hunt's birthday party. Talking to MPs and realising they were pushing a policy they actually knew was wrong because it was the best compromise they could get isn't something that goes down too well with teenagers. I'd spent my last two birthdays in a pub with a picture of Michael Joseph Savage over the door. The Labour Youth magazine was called The Red Flag. We weren't pissing about with compromise, surely.

Roll on April 1989, and the split between the parliamentary wing and the rest of the party cracked wide open. Jim Anderton walked. My ex-Hero David Lange said something nasty about a personal friend. We called an emergency meeting of the Council in Auckland, after which we split down the middle. I was in the half that resigned and drank all the wine. Most of them went on to join New Labour. Me, I was seventeen and exhausted with politics. I also shared the concerns of a close friend about some of Anderton's behaviour. One last (unsuccessful) go at sleeping with the secretary and I was done with party politics.

1990 was off to university, and a pol sci course that introduced me to a very strange concept. In other countries, they had different ways of electing governments. Some of these were proportional. I really liked the sound of this German system. It seemed, well, fair and democratic. A couple of years later and I was campaigning again. I'd like to take a moment to thank Peter Shirtcliffe: we couldn't have done it without him. That's one of the things I really like about the Kiwi psyche: any time someone spends obscene amounts of money telling us we're stupid, we really like to tell them to get stuffed. Even if we don't actually understand the issue.

I supported MMP like I never had the Labour Party. I drove people crazy never shutting up about it. At the 1993 election I was sitting in a car outside a polling booth with an ex-boyfriend having this conversation:

"And then, in 1981, it happened again. More people voted Labour than National, but National got more seats."

"Really?"

"Yep."

"That's stupid."

"I know."

"Back in a minute."

I don't know whether he voted just to shut me up, or because he thought if he ate the cereal there might be a surprise free gift in the bottom of the packet, but he voted, and that was a first.

I have a certain sense of satisfaction about that campaigning now. Nineteen years after Jim and I both quit the Labour Party, I'm sitting here in his electorate. And even though I'd rather swallow a live rat than vote for him, I know I'll still have one vote that counts.

I think he'd be a bit grateful too.

Australians. They’re just like us, only brasher, freer and stronger right? We're all nanny-state and worrying about feelings, they're all 'whadaaaaarya' and biting the heads off snakes. Except apparently Australians can't go on the internet without someone holding their hand.

Like a lot of people around here I was pretty happy with the result of the last Australian election. Yet amidst all the apologising and signing up for Kyoto, Kevin Rudd's shiny new government did something that slipped under my radar. Probably a lot of things, really, but this is what bothers me now: the Aussie Clean Feed. They’re intending to filter all content at an ISP level, to remove child pornography. And other pornography. And R-rated content. And violence. And ‘inappropriate content’.

Let’s be fair. The British started it. As of the beginning of this year, the British ‘voluntary’ clean feed has now been applied by all ISPs. Because the filtering isn’t mandatory there’s been no legislation, no vote and no debate. If British users try to access blacklisted pages, they will be shown a soothing 404 error, to avoid the distress of being informed that the content has been censored.

Even in Australia this isn’t really the Labor Party’s baby. This is policy that the Australia Institute and the Family First Party were pushing back in 2003. The Liberals were in on the act by 2005, though reading their speeches, you can understand the concern. Apparently, the internet works differently in Australia:

Even in our own homes, you go home, turn on your home computer and bingo-out come the pornographic sites. You are hit again and again.
~ Senator Guy Barnett, Lib, Tas

you have only got to press P on the Internet and all this stuff appears free of charge in front of you
~ Senator Paul Calvert, Lib, Tas

I can only hope I never work out how to ‘press P on the internet’ so I can avoid getting punched in the face by bingo-porn.

The Rudd government is getting the job done. There’s AU$75 million set aside in the Federal budget over the next two years for implementing the compulsory clean feed scheme. Some of this funding will come from the now-defunct NetAlert filter scheme, which provided filtering software free of charge to Australian households.

In July, the government ran a trial of various filtering systems in Tasmania. There’s an excellent round-up of the results here. In brief:
- while load testing was based on thirty users and only blocked 3930 sites, network degradation was as high as 75%. The more accurate the filter was, the worse the effect it had on performance. One filter caused a 22% degradation in speed when it wasn’t actually filtering.
- at best, sites were correctly blocked 92-95% of the time. At worst, more than one in ten got through.
- at best, sites were incorrectly blocked (blocked when they contained no objectionable content) 1% of the time. That doesn’t sound too bad, but imagine that’s your business, one of the one in a hundred sites blocked from the entire Australian market when you’ve done nothing wrong. At worst, over-blocking hit over 6%.
- the only way to filter content on instant messengers or peer to peer protocols was to block them completely.
- The filters do nothing to protect children from actual dangers such as cyber-bullying or stalking.

This has been touted as a success, and the project is powering on to its next step, a real-world pilot program.

Now, let’s assume that protecting children from child pornography is a pressing need. Let’s assume that it’s easy to define pornography and Kevin Rudd is inarguably correct when he calls this picture ‘disgusting’. Let’s assume that Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy has people’s best interests at heart and his opponents can justly be characterised thusly:

Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation of the internet is like going down the Chinese road. If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree.

Worried about free speech? Concerned that nobody seems to know what’s on the blacklist, but that it will cover legal material? You’re obviously a pervert. They’re thinking about the perverts too, though. You may be able to opt out of filtering by contacting your ISP and asking to be put on the 'filthy uncensored internet' list. Though as the filtering software will still be running on your connection, it’ll be filthy uncensored slow internet.

This system will be applied to every public and private net connection in the country. It will be applied to every household, even though only a third of Australian households have children and only a third of those have filtering software installed – even though it’s free. Oddly the policy is being aggressively pushed despite it being very unpopular with internet users - 51.5% strongly oppose the plan, while only 2.9% strongly support it.

But even if you assume that pre-chewed baby-food internet for adults is an acceptable sacrifice for protecting children, the simple fact is that filtering doesn’t do that. All filters both over-block and under-block. They don’t protect children from chatting to people they shouldn’t, putting silly things on their MySpace pages, or being bullied by other kids. They don’t help children learn to make good decisions about using the net.

Yes, some parents want their children’s internet filtered. They were able to do that, using the previous government’s NetAlert free filter program, which is being discontinued and having its funding diverted to the CleanFeed. Obviously not enough parents were Thinking of the Children, so now it’s the Federal Government’s job.

One of the joys of raising our kids has been teaching them to speak our language. I don’t mean English, I mean the particular little dialect that's unique to our family. Like any group language, it's an agglomeration of cultural references and code-words: references to events for which I guess you had to be there. Like any group language, it's designed for speedy communication between the members, and bonding through exclusion of outsiders.

It leads to little hiccups in life (RL, meat-space), of course. Luckily, people were very accepting of my son being the only kid in his kindy using the words 'whom' and 'whilst' correctly – or indeed at all. The only problem came when he did a painting that was just the word 'HELL', painted neatly across the bottom of a large piece of paper. "Were you writing 'hello' and you ran out of room?" his teacher asked. No, he explained patiently, it said 'HELL'. "That’s where Diablo lives".

I'm not sure whether their concerns were allayed by the information that Diablo was also the reason he could read three-digit numbers and knew what a bardiche was, but they shut up about it, which I’m calling a win.

Now that our kids are older, we've been introducing them to our televisual cultural icons. They're now learning why we say 'they’re all dead, Dave' and 'fire bad, tree pretty'. I'm looking forward to teaching them about 'dammit Janet' and 'I didn’t make him for you'. Some flummox me, though: I've no idea any more where the pervasive 'I've fallen and I can't get up' came from in the first place.

I’d love to see what happens in someone's brain when they get a casual pop-culture reference, because I'm sure there's a big reward ping. Echo-response didn’t do much for me when it was:

May the Lord be with you.
And also with you.

but give me:

You're wet.
Yes, it's raining

Or

I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit
It's the only way to be sure

and I has a happy. I once introduced myself to another Honours student solely on the basis that she was singing 'I’m going to eat you little fishy' under her breath. One of the things I love about PA System is the astonishing breadth of the cultural references – all the way from Evelyn Waugh to Ferris Bueller. The more I get, the more I feel like I belong.

At Bardic Web we can often tell how old someone is or what kind of groups they've come from by the language they use, their punctuation and grammar and which abbreviations they understand without explanation. We drew up a glossary so people could look things up without asking and highlighting their difference from the group. It’s geared more towards knowing NPC and WTF than IANALB, which we’ve never needed. Then we drew up another one for the language that we’d developed together as a group, and which was never going to be useful anywhere else. So for instance ‘this looks well Rikerable’ means ‘on the face of it, this plot situation is intractable, but I reckon if my character boffs that NPC we’ll be right’. Then there’s another layer of admin-only terms, because we found we needed words for splatter-guns and attention-whores. That's three dialects for a fairly small group.

Being from four different countries, we've had to learn to speak each other's meat-space English as well. Generally that's not been too much of a problem. I've learned what 'pony up' means, and they've stopped going OMGWTFBBQ when I describe a task as 'a piece of piss'.

In the time that Public Address has been running System, we've gone through a few words of our own. Theatre seems to have done its dash, but at the same time, I don't think I’ve seen a Theatreable situation for a while. Pendant will hang around in the background, and I’m predicting lolnui will have a slightly longer shelf-life than $%#&-quaxing, which has already mutated to just plain quaxing, but neither is in it for the long haul. (I could well be completely wrong about this. I Am Not A Linguist, but...)

Most people don't seem to really be aware that they use group language, and effortlessly slide between different dialects as the situation demands. You only tend to notice when something goes wrong – like the woman who went into her office supplies store and said 'I can has printer paper?', or the time I tried to return something on the basis that it was 'borken'. I can’t see my own group language to the extent that I often have to get someone else to read over my columns to make sure they're intelligible. (Or in some cases to see if they're offensive, because I’ve lost all concept of where a 'normal' person’s line is in that respect.)

Language indoctrination hasn't been entirely successful, I have to admit. I got an email from my daughter in the weekend asking if she could have AIM installed on her computer:
u now the one that u can, like, chat 2 each other?
That'll teach me to let her use MMORPGs. Still, as long as she's still emailing me from her bedroom instead of walking down the hall and talking to me, it's not a total loss.

Sleep and I have never been great friends. We're more like hostile flatmates: we live in the same space, occasionally we co-operate, but no matter how hard we try, we can’t get on.

The DSPS is manageable, if hugely inconvenient. I didn’t even know it was a 'thing' until a couple of years ago. As a teenager I just accepted the 'lazy' label and climbed out my bedroom window in the middle of the night. (Climbing out was easy, getting back in was a good deal more problematic.) Though if you ask my mother, she tells stories of me baking and rearranging all the furniture in my bedroom at two in the morning, which I believe to be slanderous exaggerations. She also laughs at me when I complain about the difficulty of getting my daughter to go to sleep.

Once I had the hang of uni, I organised my course choices around making sure I had no lectures before eleven in the morning. I didn't need to do biology anyway. This worked until my Honours year, when I had Renaissance Drama for an hour and a half, first thing in the morning, in a room that got full sun. The plays had been about for five hundred years: I’m not sure why they couldn't wait round until I got out of bed.

In recent years, we've fallen into a nice rhythm. My Sainted Partner sees the kids off to school as he goes to work, and I sleep in. Or as I call it, 'sleep'.

Every now and then, though, sleep packs its bags and goes home to Mother for a week or so. For that week, I’ll get something like twenty hours sleep total.

At uni, this wasn’t a problem. In fact it was great. I had two other friends who were chronic insomniacs. We once killed the flat pumpkin (well on its way to becoming a sentient entity) using every knife in the house, and a fish slice. It was a frenzied attack, though to be fair my co-assailant's state might have been caused by the five litres of Coke he’d drunk earlier that day. On, need it be said, a dare.

Night was always my favourite time. It's a night wind that gets under my skin, the patterns of light on black, the unique smell of a city in the dark. Walking alone down Colombo Street at three a.m. on a Wednesday, the only sounds are your boot-heels and that little click traffic lights make when they change colour. The people you meet are different from day people, and in some way kin to each other. Even in prosaic Christchurch, there's a sense you could round a corner and find yourself in a Charles de Lint novel.

But now I'm old. Sleep deprivation is something that - like knocking back eighteen cocktails with a friend while waiting to go downstairs and drink four jugs so we could get one free - I can no longer bounce back from with a cup of coffee and a couple of Panadol.

Being an arts student, an altered mental state was practically de rigueur. As a mum (a phrase that always makes me feel like I should be selling cough syrup) the bizarreness of the sleep-deprived mental state is just a pain in the arse.

Moving through a world with all the internal coherency of a David Lynch adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel makes the simplest tasks nearly impossible. Every object holds equal weight, painfully bright but slightly out of focus. I'll find myself standing in the bathroom holding a meat tenderiser, with no idea what I was doing.

The worst bit of insomnia is going to bed exhausted and not being able to sleep. It’s different from being kept awake by a crying baby or that bloody drummer who lives next door. You have every opportunity to sleep, and instead you're lying awake staring at the clock while someone very clumsy plays an all-night game of Operation with your synapses. (It’s 3:42. I wonder what Turkish Delight is called in Turkey?)

It's not so great for the rest of the family either. The only person capable of remembering where they're supposed to be and when turns into someone with all the even temperament and approachability of a cat wearing dolls' clothes. It's not the best time to tell me the school is having a cake stall tomorrow. Is it, dear?

After a few nights I start sleeping again, and gradually go back to normal. I edit everything I wrote and spend some time explaining to people that when I said 'shut your bloody whining' what Mummy really meant to say was… For now, there's a school cake stall tomorrow. They're recommended 'something healthy, like muffins', which I appear to have read as 'chocolate fudge cake'. So I’ll be needing a packet of wine biscuits and my meat tenderiser. Now, where did I leave that?

This column was supposed to go next week, but in the midst of the Boobs on Bikes debate, I realised that I was in danger of blowing all my powder in the comments section, so instead I’m going to jump my own gun. It's been put together in a hurry, so please excuse the lack of rhetorical flourish.

I’d like to introduce you to the Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy. I know there are a lot of feminist carnivals out there, and I've seen the same material featured in this one and the Down Under Feminist Carnival, but this is the one which most often speaks to me. That doesn't mean it's 'better' than the others. I'm not trying to privilege this voice above others, I'm just trying to add another piece to the picture.

Over the last couple of months, starting there and spreading out the way the internet and cancers do, I've become more and more fascinated by the voices of sex workers on the web. They're not difficult to find. They're also all different. I don't know why this should be surprising, except perhaps that people in sex work are so often referred to in monolithic terms. They're all women, they're all victims, they're all subject to some degree of coercion, they're all lacking real choices.

Except they're not. Some of them are Renegade Evolution (mildly NSFW). There’s no way in hell I'd have the ovarian fortitude to tell this woman she lacks agency. She's a one-time prostitute, current porn actor and out-call stripper, possessor of degrees in History and Theatre, columnist at Village Voice, and currently guest-blogging at Feministe. On top of that, she works with the Sex Workers’ Outreach Program, so it’s not just her own experience she brings to the blog.

I’ll also point eyes at Wil Rockwell, a male sex worker, because I think it pays to remember those exist. And for a range of views, Bound Not Gagged, a collective blog for sex workers. From there you can access a plethora of links. (I counted them, and that is exactly one plethora.)

For dirty filthy pornographers, you can’t go past Ms Naughty (NSFW!) – Candida Royale doesn’t have a blog. The Ms is good for news in the porn sphere on censorship, as well as the travails of women making porn for women in a heavily male-dominated industry. And also Olympic perving…
I’m aware that the voices of those at the very bottom of the heap are still missing. The closest I can get is the University of Otago’s report on The Impact of the Prostitution Reform Act on the Health and Safety Practices of Sex Workers, which includes first-person quotes from their interviews with sex workers.
I share the same problem Wendy McElroy had when she wrote her book, XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography.

With all the voices shouting about pornography-pro and con-the ones least heeded are those of women who work in the industry. Usually, when you want to know about something, you ask people who have first-hand experience of it. With pornography, however, most of the theories come from people who are "outsiders," with no direct knowledge of the industry.

I am open to this charge, as well.

I don’t want to join the ranks of middle-class women sitting comfortably at their keyboards offering their opinions on sex work. Fortunately, with voices like those so accessible, I don’t have to. I can still my mouth and my fingers and simply listen to what they have to say.

I’ll leave the last word to Ren:

Now, what does get to me is the stereotyping, which comes from all sides, male and female, and on all fronts. I’ve discussed this before; the default ipso-facto image that the world as a whole uses as “Sex Worker”; the victim of childhood abuse, the junkie, the drop out, the person with no other choice, no other talents, no hope, and no where to go. And while the shoe fits for some…most street prostitutes, many dancers, some porn women (and men), it is not accurate for all. And that does bother me. It bothers me a great deal.