proposed Australian electoral law prohibiting anonymity in political blogs

Another interesting article in the Australian Financial Review which I'm not going to link to.
John Quiggin, Let a hundred blogs bloom, Australian Financial Review (1 September 2005).

The good thing is that the author is an Australian blogger, and I was able to find the guts of the issue in the article in one of his posts, which was followed up here.

The issue is that the Australian government is wanting to expand section 328 of the Electoral Act so that online publications (including blogs) commenting on political issues would be deemed electoral material for the purposes of the Act, and be subject to the Act's disclosure rules. The big impact would be that it would be illegal to allow anonymous commentors to write about political issues in a blog.

As mentioned by John Quiggin, it's another instance where online speech would be less protected than other speech (e.g. print newspaper letters to the editor and talkback radio). It would be extremely difficult to enforce, particularly against bloggers who want to remain anonymous, but it would still create a chilling effect, especially for bloggers who use their names.

Of course, the Howard government in Australia is more concerned with preventing criticism than preserving freedom of speech.