Is the Australian Internet Filter in Trouble?

I was reading the feeds today and I can across this article on news.com.au (dated April 30th) and I find it interesting that more hasn’t been made of it. Basically it is wondering why an official policy on the Internet Censorship Filter hasn’t been introduced into Parliament yet and was speculating if the much hyped Internet Censorship Filter may indeed have been scrapped before the next Federal election, due later this year.

As it turns out, the Rudd Labour government did come out with a statement to counter these claims, a spokesperson said “The Government is committed to the cyber safety policy.” And the government does plan to take the filter to the next election. Stephen Conroy (Federal Communications Minister and godfather of the filter) continues to try and sell his ‘the internet filter is needed to block access to material such as child pornography and other illegal content’ line, but I wonder what to read between the lines here.

Everyone is incredibly vocal about this policy and I think the government really did think they were on a winner here, but now that the geeks have come out of the woodwork for the R18+ issue (89000 signatures were collected for the introduction of the new rating for games, more than the Abolish WorkChoices petition, which only got 85000), maybe the Rudd government is worried, that is an awful lot of votes to lose at a federal election. And now that they have dropped the ETS, it kinda shows that they are no strangers to backing away from a controversy. Just my thoughts.

Read the article and let me know your thoughts.