The other day, I loaded up the internet on my computer, and sat down to surf the web.

I was looking for a good recipe for strawberry jam, but instead I accidentally stumbled upon instructions for making a dirty bomb. I printed them out and filed them carefully in my Women's Weekly Recipe Card Index.

It wasn't the only time something like this had happened, either; why, just last week I was trying to find a friend's online wedding photo album and instead wandered into page after page of pornography. Whoops!

And, wouldn't you know it, when I thought I was downloading the schedule for this year's Royal Melbourne Show Preserves contest, instead it turned out to be a PDF full of tips about shoplifting while tagging Government property with extremist graffiti.

The same thing happened to a friend's child, who was using the family computer to do "homework", and ended up watching 10 hours of snuff movies and how-to films about the best ways to dispatch a captured foreign journalist.

Of course it's worth noting that all of this happened when I opened a tear in the space/time fabric and entered an alternate universe known as Conroyland.

In Conroyland, paedophiles merrily post child porn images on easily accessible websites (I've already registered www.angelfire.com/sesamestreet69/sexykids), and parents are freed from the responsibility of monitoring their children's internet usage, because luckily the Conroyland Government takes care of all that.

So, it's easy to understand why Senator Conroy is lobbying for mandatory internet filtering; he just wants to make Australia more like his home planet. He's like Jeff Bridges in Starman, or Klaatu in The Day The Earth Stood Still; he just wants the internet to be safe for children.

All well and good, Darth Conroy, except that here on Earth, the internet isn't for children.

The proposed internet filter dropped from the front pages over the past few months, but newly installed Prime Minister Julia Gillard appears to have been zapped by Conroy's mind control ray.

In the last day, the PM has expressed "a set of concerns about the dark side of the new technology, if I can use that expression, and, you know, clearly you can't walk into a cinema in Australia and see certain things and we shouldn't on the internet be able to access those things either. So, Stephen Conroy is working to get this in the right shape."

Worryingly, Christian group FamilyVoice Australia were "delighted" with Gillard's stance.

At times like this, one has to wonder if any of Australia's politicians have, in fact, ever used the internet.

Sure, you can't walk into a cinema and "see certain things" - but you can't walk all over the net and "access" them, either. Yes, there's plenty of porn on the internet, but the "worst" of it requires a credit card subscription to access, and the material fuelling the filter's rhetoric - child porn, snuff films - circulates furtively through peer-to-peer networks.

You can't just Google "hot up for it 10-year-olds" and click "I'm feeling lucky".

Those of us who use and understand the internet have gone blue in the face trying to explain why Darth Conroy's filter will never do anything other than slow our already, in a global context, pitifully slow download speeds and is sure to be undone by a few canny "hackers" within days of its launch. Existing VPN (virtual private network) technology would be able to bypass the filter.

ACMA's "blacklist" of banned sites is said to be capped at around 10,000 URLs (web addresses, for my dad and Darth Conroy). When you consider that YouTube, for example, has roughly 29 hours of content uploaded per minute, the ineffectiveness of the filter comes into stark relief.

Furthermore, blocking URLs does nothing about cyber bullies who utilise Facebook or MySpace, identity theft, computer viruses, or, indeed, the P2P networks where pirated software and music - and Conroy's fabled child porn - is distributed.

(If you'd like to know more, this Hungry Beast piece from last year helpfully explains the myriad ways in which the proposed filter is doomed to fail.)

There are oases of sanity among the Labor ranks, however; last week, Senator Kate Lundy suggested the filter could operate on an opt-in basis (perfect, for example, for concerned parents whose surnames begin with a "C" and end with an "onroy"). Hysterically, Conroy's response was to let us all know that he's "not into opting in to child porn."

What Conroy fails to realise, time and time again, is that no one is opting into child porn except criminals. We are all against it - all of us except the actual child pornographers themselves. Perhaps if Labor funnelled money away from a pointless censorship regime that most rational (voting) adults see as unnecessary, and towards catching the criminals responsible for the "dark side" of the internet, they might be onto an election-winner.

That option would also mean Conroy would have to return to his home planet, making it a winner for everyone - including the children of tomorrow.

Clem Bastow is a freelance writer, broadcaster and music critic.