By Melissa Short, Principal Petitioner (e-mail: melsy29@hotmail.com) Edited by Andrew Middleton, Petition Coordinator

The petition addressed to the House of Representatives against mandatory internet censorship in Australia, has been presented on Monday, the 21st of June. If you would like to watch the petition being presented to the House of Representatives in Parliament, it will be broadcast live on Australian Parliamentary House webcast, and if you missed watching it live, it will be archived and still available for viewing for at least one month. The Hansard transcript of the June 21st, 2010 sitting of the House of Representatives includes the tabling and reading of this petition. Scroll down to page 94 of the PDF to view it, or download it as a single page. Over 7,000 signatures were garnered in the six months that this petition ran for, and due to an extremely high amount of people not recording their first and last names, when signing this petition but rather just a first initial with their last name, this has resulted in only 2166 being accepted as the count of valid signatures attached to our petition. This was the 4th highest amount of signatures for a petition tabled in the sitting. It is a terrible let down that not all submitted signatures can be counted, but according to the Standing Committee on Petitions, 2166 is still a very high amount to be collected for a petition and is a considerable amount of signatures collected by people of the public, people with no funding or affiliation with the media or any organizations to help push a campaign for this petition. So I won’t dwell on the loss of signatures for too long and just look very forward to Monday, too watching this document opposing internet censorship becoming an official government record with over 2,000 valid signatures! Although any signatures garnered going forward cannot be added to this Monday’s presentation, I have recently been advised by the Petitions Committee that if we choose to we can keep collecting signatures, but it will not be added to the signature count for this presentation, but presented in the next sitting session (August) with mention of the original submission of 2166 signatures. Submitting further signatures will continue to show the government that we are strongly opposed. So the good news is, that if you are one of those people who signed the petition but didn’t record your full name, you now haven’t missed out on having your signature counted, you can still print out the petition and sign it and either send it to me or directly to the Petitions committee and this will count for the August session.

Hansard transcript of the June 21st sitting of the House of Representatives (page 94)

Hansard transcript of the House of Representatives tabling of the petition against mandatory internet filtering (1 page only)

House of Representatives Petition homepage (download links for petition available here)

House of Representatives Standing Committee on Petitions