Australians are internationally renowned for our high rates of thievery on the cyber seas, but now the Communications Minister is trimming his sails to the wind in pursuit, writes Annabel Crabb.

The international forces of resistance against internet piracy have a new champion: Horatio Hornblower, known on land as the Member for Wentworth, Malcolm Bligh Turnbull.

The Communications Minister has today stepped forth in support of a new bid to make internet service providers partially accountable for the misdeeds of their thieving varmint customers.

In many ways, Mr Turnbull is the perfect Hornblower. His breeding and his independence of spirit equip him faultlessly for the life of the maritime enforcer. He has ancestral links to William Bligh, and bears his name. His noble visage seems purpose-built for staring determinedly into a retreating horizon; his plentiful hair for ruffling by a salt breeze, as increasingly desperate carrier pigeons from the Palace go majestically and serially ignored.

In the turbid waters of the Internets, Hornblower has well-established sea-legs, as opposed to his leader, Mr Abbott, who wouldn't know his aft from his elbow, as he has cheerfully admitted on national television.

He even owns a boat already - co-owns one, in fact, with the NBN executive JB Rousselot. It's not much of a boat, apparently - Hornblower himself last year described it as "a hazard to shipping" - but you've got to start somewhere. And as a member of Tony Abbott's Cabinet, Hornblower is accustomed to long and complex adventures with only men for company.

The new anti-piracy mission comes in the form of a Government white paper, which proposes new ways of curbing Australians' passion for nicking movies, TV shows, music and games online. It may be an affectionate nod to our nation's convict history, or it might be just that we are really, really tight, but Australians are internationally renowned for our high rates of internet thievery.

(Fun fact: Australians lead the world in Game Of Thrones piracy. Fun unrelated fact: TorrentFreak in 2011 named Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End as the tenth-most-pirated movie of all time. So even internet pirates have a sense of humour.)

Hornblower this morning pointed out that Australians might be more prepared to pay for content online if it wasn't arbitrarily more expensive than the price Americans - say - pay for the same stuff. But he also expressed support for a new mechanism by which Australian internet service providers would be obliged to send warnings to customers who illegally downloaded content, and could then be forced by way of court order to block those customers' access to pirate websites.

As any maritime strategist worth his salt knows, you have to tack occasionally. And Hornblower's interest in holding internet service providers responsible for what their customers do is at variance with his former support for the view of the Australian High Court that internet service providers were obliged to do diddly-squat (to use a non-legal term).

"It is very, very, very difficult - if not impossible - for someone that is just selling connectivity, just providing bandwidth, to then be monitoring what people are doing," quoth Horatio at the time.

Hornblower is himself an internet pioneer; he was a founder of Ozemail. And his traditional orientation has been staunchly towards freedom in all its forms. He opposed Labor's internet filter. He was the only federal MP to champion the artist Bill Henson's right to work without police seizing his pictures. He spent a chunk of the 1980s fighting in court for the right for the British former MI5 officer Peter Wright to publish his memoirs, against Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet secretary, Baron Armstrong of Ilminster. (That this happened roughly about the same time as Tony Abbott was at Oxford organising pro-Thatcher demonstrations is just one sparkling ironic morsel among the constellation that whizzes around the heads of the Prime Minister and his Minister for Communications).

But even an intrepid seafarer like Hornblower is never really exempt from the ruler he serves. And in broad terms, the Australian Government's relationship status with information and freedom would best be summarised as "complicated".

Hornblower's opposition to an internet filter, for instance, was richly apparent during the years of the Labor government, in which he denounced Stephen Conroy's proposed censorship model for the internet as a "Conrovian" folly.

His contempt still hovered palpably in the air during the federal election campaign in September last year, when he was handed the Coalition's draft internet policy which included adults-only content filters on mobile phones. Hornblower made a heroic attempt to defend the policy - which had been written by various party landlubbers - for about 12 hours, before everyone agreed to abandon ship, leaving Hornblower free, presumably, to violently kill those responsible.

Realistically, however, when it comes to information and freedom, there are filters everywhere. They are unavoidable.

For a while there, the Government had an Andrew Bolt filter; Attorney General George Brandis was determined to remove the restrictions inherent to the Racial Discrimination Act that crimped - with the assistance of the judiciary - the Melbourne columnist's ability to offend pale-skinned Aborigines.

This campaign has petered out a bit of late, mainly because of the slow-motion crash between the ideological purity of Senator Brandis' claim that "everyone has the right to be a bigot" with the lived experience of people who have actually dealt with one.

Even that filter, temporary as it was, was not entirely absolute; the inalienable human right to be mean to Chris Kenny, for example, was not much-championed.

The Government also maintains, unofficially, a conveyance filter. It is free with information - and rightly so - about planes, but very, very miserly with information about boats.

Such are the choppy waters that our hero Hornblower must navigate as he undertakes his noble mission. Where information, freedom, business and pirates are concerned, there are waterspouts, typhoons and sandbars everywhere. Do not ask why they are there: They just ... ARRRRRRR.

Annabel Crabb is the ABC's chief online political writer. She tweets at @annabelcrabb. View her full profile here.