Christians have praised John Howard's announcement to compel all Internet Service Providers, at the request of parents, to provide filters for every household to protect children from pornography.
Jim Wallace, the managing director for the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL), has welcomed the government's move to protect the family and said it was an acknowledgment of the danger that pornography posed not just to children but to society-at-large.
"We welcome the Government's move to protect families in this way and their implicit acknowledgment of the harm which pornography causes," Mr Wallace said on Friday.
"Pornography exploits women, damages marriages and can contribute to sexual abuse."
He also said that he hoped a solution could be developed by all levels of government to tackle this 'serious problem.'
"In due course we hope to see the Federal, State and Territory Governments take a combined national approach to protecting the Australian population from this serious problem."
Melinda Tankard Reist, author and founder of the feminist think tank Women's Forum Australia, had described pornography as "The sludge … that contribut(ed) to a moral tsunami in Indigenous communities."
On the Online-opinion website, she wrote that men who commit crimes of sexual violence 'live on a diet of pornography' with up to a third of child sex offenders saying that they viewed pornography before offending.
"The Ninth Australasian Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect in November 2003 was told by staff from the Child at Risk Assessment Unit, Canberra Hospital that exposure to X-rated pornography is a significant factor in children younger than 10-years-old sexually abusing other children," she wrote.
She, along with other groups such as the Fatherhood Foundation and ACL, has called on the Federal Government to step in and ban the sale of X-rated pornography in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT).