When Labor's Communications Minister Stephen Conroy won the title Internet villain of the year most educated people realised it wasn't something to celebrate. So it might be surprising for some that the title could potentially be returning to Australia so soon...

Australia's main opposition party, the deceptively named Liberals (who actually lurk at the Marine Le Pen grade of conservatism) have just announced plans to resurrect the plan by implanting filtering technology in all modems, routers and smartphones.

Whether they do or don't, there are serious concerns that they have described Australia's still-under-construction national broadband network as a wasteful project (which is potentially true) but failed to provide any credible alternative: who really thinks the conservative's proposed 25MBps will be a serious technology when they finish deploying it in 2019?.

It is interesting to look at the bigger picture to see where this stupidity comes from. A political poll released early this week gives us half the story:

A skewed population of retiring baby boomers

It is obvious that older voters prefer the conservative "coalition" parties, 57% of over-55s in particular. It is a huge jump from the 44% of voters in the age group below them.

What this table doesn't tell us is that Australia's population is top-heavy with Baby Boomers. In other words, there are actually quite a lot of those over-55-year-old voters. In fact, it is estimated that close to 1 in 3 Australians will be in this category within the next 10 years.

People who want the world to be the way it was in the 60s: many have already paid off a mortgage on a home in the suburbs with no access to things like public transport. They grew up under the white Australia policy and are frustrated at the presence of educated hard working foreigners from countries like India and China.

Retired, no longer working, expecting the state to provide roads to their poorly located McMansions and free health care but little concern for broadband or anything that smells new. As they are no longer working, many have no commercial demand for broadband but will happily vote for a policy to censor it even if they don't use it themselves, simply because they want to see a Government that is blocking change.

Sadly, they are shooting themselves in the foot: younger generations of Australians need to work and pay tax if there is to be any hope of keeping the dream alive for older Australians. However, with the conservatives cutting education to fund an over-dramatised response to immigration that costs billions of dollars every year, cutting corners and dumbing-down essential technology like the Internet, it seems that working-age Australians will struggle to compete in the global marketplace.