Over 300,000 Houses of Parliament porn requests
Official records have suggested there were more than 300,000 attempts to access pornographic websites at the Houses of Parliament in the United Kingdom in the last year.
Figures were published by the Huffington Post UK, after a freedom of information act was requested.
It is unclear who is responsible, Members of Parliament, staff or peers and figures may have been exaggerated by software and websites which reload themselves, say Parliament officials, who attempted to play down the significance of the total.
A Commons spokesman said: “We do not consider the data to provide an accurate representation of the number of purposeful requests made by network users due to the variety of ways in which websites can be designed to act, react and interact and due to the potential operation of third party software,
However, the figure – which works out at around 800 attempts a day – is still an embarrassment for Prime Minister David Cameron, who announced earlier this year most UK households would have pornography blocked by their internet provider unless they opted out.
Not that it would be a problem in Australia.
Earlier today the Fair Work commission ruled that sending pornography through the work email system is not an automatic sacking offence.
Three Victorian postal workers were dismissed after using the Australia Post email system to distribute sexually explicit material in their Dandenong workplace.
They appealed, and the full bench of the Fair Work Commission - in a non-unanimous judgement - found the terminations were harsh and the workers could be reinstated.
Two of the three commissioners said in a statement: "There is an emerging trend... regarding the accessing, sending or receiving and storing pornography by an employee as a form of serious misconduct that invariably merits termination of employment."
They said that was inconsistent with basic principle.
The commissioners emphasised they were not endorsing or authorising the emailing of porn at work, but arguing the same unfair dismissal laws apply in workplace pornography cases as with other forms of misbehaviour.
Emailing pornography "is not a separate species of misconduct to which special rules apply," the statement said.
They found Australia Post did not take into account the workers' long years of service, and cited Australia Post's lack of warnings and enforcement of policies.
