New South Wales upper-house member Penny Sharpe railed against the filter in her blog. Yes, she is from the Labor party, but the NSW and federal arms aren’t exactly best buddies right now.

Three younger Liberal parliamentarians – MPs Alex Hawke and Jamie Briggs and Senator Simon Birmingham – have also come out against the filter, although this is mainly confirming their previous positions. Most interestingly, Hawke says he has advised the Christian lobby against the filter proposal, even though he is himself a Christian.

As I mentioned the other day, Senator Kate Lundy has been painfully fence sitting. Despite her well known and vociferous opposition to internet filtering while she was in opposition, Lundy wouldn’t say much at all when I spoke to her. Subsequently she posted a lengthy piece on her blog, the gist of which was that she opposed filtering but it was Labor policy before the election, we voted for them and she can’t speak against party policy.

Although there is still an open question about whether Labor’s pre-election policy made it clear the filter would be mandatory – the language was pretty fluffy.

While these small brushstrokes begin to paint of picture of widespread opposition to the filter, no one seems to have an overall idea of how the anti-censorship movement might achieve its goals. Stay tuned…

“Australia does not have a Bill of Rights which protects free speech at a federal level. We don’t have the protections that they have in every other democratic country.That means Australia might be subject to far more stringent regulations on the internet than would be possible in other democratic countries.”

The academic community is singing from the same hymn sheet on this idea, judging by a report released today from media studies profs Catharine Lumby, Lelia Green and John Hartley. “The proposal would set Australia apart from other Western liberal democracies that have opted for a transparent, voluntary filtering regime,” they said.

They analysed the proposed filtering regime and found it could censor a whole lot more than just kiddie porn, including perfectly legal material.

“The ACMA is blacklisting a significant number of sites that are not illegal content but are considered offensive. While this may be considered acceptable where filtering is opt-in by an end user (or parent for family computers), under a mandatory filtering regime this would result in capturing material that is clearly legal but restricted in availability (off the internet) through classification restrictions.”

Unlike the Liberal Party’s shambolic approach to party unity on the emissions trading scheme, Labor polticos are so far toeing the party line on censorship. Senator Kate Lundy wasn’t saying much today, despite her strong record of criticising internet censorship proposals in the past. Looks like Peter Garrett isn’t the only one to have abandoned his principles once in power.

The last issue of Nett with my mug on the editor’s page came out last Friday, including my interview with twin brothers Brian and Vincent Wu, founders of clothing retailer Incu.

The best interviews to do are the ones that defy your expectations. Plenty of small business owners aren’t shy about telling you how great they are, which gives you plenty of material for the story, but leaves you feeling a bit cheap and dirty at the end of it. Not these guys! You definitely don’t expect successful fashionistas to be friendly, humble and modest, but Brian and Vincent really are and I’m sure that has a lot to do with their success.

Over the last year, Incu managed to land a coveted deal: the rights to distribute UK brand Topshop in Australia. Considering how many Australian women buy from Topshop UK online, this is very big. The guys from Incu also told me exclusively about their plans to (finally) open an online store next year, and once again I think they have exactly the right approach.

I’ve also been doing some exciting news stories for ZDNet on stuff like telecommunications tenders, state government IT policies, how bad state governments are at looking after our personal data and ERP consolidation projects.

Aside from this, it’s all been about making clients happy by meeting their insane deadlines, finding somewhere to live and even showing up at the odd IT industry Christmas party. Phew!

In the same spirit, yesterday I called Toshiba tech support for help on a very minor issue with my laptop. Ideally I would have preferred to email a question and then get annoyed when no one responded (59% of companies don’t respond to email queries, you know). But Toshiba doesn’t give you the option; just a phone number and a postal address. So I called, and it quickly became apparent I wasn’t going to get anywhere fast. Because I had nothing better to do while waiting on hold, I started Tweeting:

• I am currently caller 57 in the queue for Toshiba tech support. 57! Customer service FTW!
• Enjoying Toshiba’s commitment to customer service; I am now 43rd in the queue after 10 minutes.
• “Challenges we all face are the future and the environment” – who writes these on-hold scripts? 26 min and counting. Yay Toshiba!
• “An uguarded MFD could be an easy target” – so true! Celebrating the first half hour of Toshiba’s customer love.
• “In this oversaturated market, good quality in LCD TVs stands out”. Toshiba has stopped telling me my position in the queue. 47 mins.
• Do on-hold music composers proudly call their mothers to say, ‘Hey ma, my music was used in Toshiba’s HOUR LONG CALL QUEUE’?
• Oh wow! An hour and five minutes on hold and I get put through… to a voicemail system. Bad Toshiba. BAD BAD BAD TOSHIBA.

While I was on hold, the system repeatedly gave me the option of giving my phone number for someone to call back. I did not use this option because in my experience, nobody ever calls back and it’s just a way of shortening the call queue to improve ‘performance’ statistics.

My live tweets were attracting a fair bit of attention and a few retweets. Jonathan Crossfield suggested I invent a hashtag for live-tweeting a call queue, which I did: #YourCallIsImportantToUs. Guess it hasn’t caught on yet.

I tried calling again later in the same day, but things were even worse than the first time. Once again, the live stream tells the story:

• Just call me glutton for punshiment: round two of Toshiba #YourCallIsImportantToUs Why can’t I email my question?
• OK, forget it. 75 callers in queue. Have used callback facility. Now holding breath until someone from Toshiba calls.
• [Two hours later] Still holding breath waiting for Toshiba to call back. Evidently they don’t monitor Twitter. Turning slightly blue.

First thing this morning, someone called. It was Toshiba’s PR manager, who admitted something was not right with the call centre and this was a cause for concern over at HQ. She got my problem fixed immediately. Happy me, but what about the 74 other p0or bastards in the call queue?

I might be a relatively well known tech journalist in real life, but on Twitter I am not hugely influential (no matter what Topsy says); I have a modest following of a smidge over 500 people. But thanks to the magic of retweeting by ZDNet Australia (1700 followers) and  Jonathan (more than 2400), my whinge was now reaching an audience of thousands. So did I get a call back because I complained a lot, because of who I am, or because some fairly influential people took up my cause?

Some conclusions and questions:

• Big companies: if you under-resource your call centres, you reduce costs but risk pissing off customers in a really big way. This isn’t as easy to get away with as it used to be because consumers have ways to hold you to account.
• If you want to reduce your call queues, provide an email support option and actually respond to queries when they come in. Why does no one understand this?
• Consumers: many big brands (or their PR firms) monitor what’s said about them on Twitter. They’ll call you back a lot faster in response to bad publicity than for regular tech support.
• If you’re influential on Twitter, or have friends who are, complaining loudly and rudely in public about poor service gets results; we’ve know this for a couple of years now. But if you’re not as famous as Michael Arrington, or even me, how effective is this technique?