I've been living overseas for a year and a half now and from time to time i hear the big stories from Australia. I follow media watch as much as I can to hear what's going on from a more critical point of view.

Today I saw the latest episode of Media Watch where they discussed media access to military operations in Afghanistan. I was disappointed, very disappointed - and more importantly, ashamed. In this report, it became clear that when an Australian soldier talks to the media when deployed, they always have a political officer present with them.

Excuse me? did we suddenly become Communist Russia while I wasn't looking? Okay, that's a bit of a jump, but still the problem isn't just the Australian Defense Force, but probably also the Australian Media who go looking for anything they can jump on and ram it across their syndicated news channels for a week. If one soldier complained of bad conditions, it'd be a "national controversy" so in that respect, you can imagine these officers are there to help protect the enlisted men.

So you have distrust on both sides. Too bad, because I cannot personally support a secret war.

Another area of disappointment from my homeland of late has been the continuing saga of attempted internet censorship. I've made my views on censorship well known within my private circle of family and friends but it's time I vent some of my rage of the great waste of time and money being spent by Steven Conroy on his attempts to censor the internet in Australia.

Australia is far away from the rest of the world, isolated, and it seems that some people try to use that to their advantage to bump up pricing (i get to compare prices of goods between the USA and Australia, currency exchange rates and shipping costs computed in, regularly and i have to say Australia gets ripped off far too much) or claim that somehow we are different to the rest of the 1st world nations. We're not and it makes no sense to think that our sensibilities are somehow more offended by potentially graphic images available on the internet.

I do believe that it's a good idea to try and protect children from graphic images and illegal content. Absolutely, kids will seek it out for themselves when they're mentally ready for it - that's just natural and it's been that way forever. What you want is to make sure they don't stumble on it if they're not looking for it - that can be quite disturbing for a child. What you don't do, though, is censor the entire nation with a blacklist of websites that the general public cannot look at.

First you start off applying a moral standard, codifying exactly what it is you think is depraved - but pretty soon you start putting your own political spin on it, such as issues like suicide, assisted suicide, birth control, abortions, religion, sexual orientation and most importantly of all, political opposition websites. If you censor one thing, who's to say you won't censor another - and who is the watchdog in all this? it needs to be the people. So it's too much of a slippery slope.

What irks me is that the people of Australia know it. Sure there are probably plenty of fear-living far-right xenophobes who want the censorship, but the majority of people and even big business shudder at the idea of having the internet censored for them. So what we get instead if Conroy wasting millions and millions of tax payer dollars on his own personal quest doing trials and studies and wasting time in parliament without ever stopping to ask the nation "Do you want this?" - to which he'd get a convincingly loud "NO" in response.

The one potentially good thing that can come out of this? once his motions are finally and utterly defeated he'll have wasted so much time and money no one will ever want him back in his position again. More than that, it'll be unlikely anyone else will attempt his censorship approach for good decade or two hopefully. Still, the crazy will always come back in some form or another.

These are two of the major issues that have been embarrassing me as an Australian lately. I felt the need to vent and may be at some point we will find a way to resolve these issues. The eyes of the world watch us. We call ourselves true blue and the sun burnt country but no body else does - we have to earn it and to do that we have to set a good example of openness and freedom. All in all, we don't do too shabby a job.