Good! Checks are a pain in the ass, and (imo) an unnecessary hassle for me every time I have to cash one.

Other than the cashflow benefits of not paying things immediately, I honestly can't see what benefit they have over other payment methods.

Time it takes me to get $$$ from a US check: 3-6 weeks.

Time it takes a wire transfer from anywhere else; 1-8 days max.

If you want to use redmine (or some of the other software mentioned below) on windows, bitnami have a stand-alone package for this. Just run the setup.exe and you'll be live in 5 minutes.

Redmine
http://bitnami.org/stack/redmine

Trac (issue tracker)
http://bitnami.org/stack/trac

Tracks (gtd app with a familiar sounding name)
http://bitnami.org/stack/tracks

mylifeorganized.net - awesome windows task list app.
This app addresses your stated problem directly. I use it myself for professional and personal tasks. You can export as XML and sync with outlook too.

Clearcontext - an outlook addin
Adds many features to outlook making it much better at handling lots of shifting work. It takes a bit of learning and setting up, worth a look though.

TaskFreak! web based task manager / todo list written in PHP

www.Gtd-php.com
A surprisingly full-featured GTD system done with PHP.

Here's a list of groupware/collab/project management tools I've either used for work or had a good play around with.
Most are commercial, since I'm sure that all the OSS stuff will already be posted here. Some of them have local hosted options

COMINDWORK - my personal favourite
Central Desktop - has outlook plugin + bookmarklets etc.
Zoho Projects - v2 is very fast and responsive
activeCollab
Assembla - would appeal to the slashdot crowd IMO
Group-Office groupware - Very slick. Also has outlook plugin.
Teamwork Project Manager
Mercurial hosting — bitbucket.org

http://www.nocleanfeed.com/ is the organised protest group/movement over here.

Personally I'll be voting for the pirate party giving preferences to the sex party in the next federal election.

And no, I didn't vote for Rudd in the first place either.

Are there any existing groups dedicated to opposing this ?

I'd like to do something constructive to help make sure this sort of BS doesn't end up as national policy.

Conroy, if nothing else, is persistent, so the problem isn't going to go away after 1-2 rounds of failure.

Rapidshare, if told about it, will remove files that infringe on copyright though. http://rapidshare.com/abuse.html It's not DMCA, but the result is basically the same. They will also fingerprint/hash files and remove such files proactively in future. Rapidshare make their money selling premium subscriptions. For the free downloads, they show ads, which I'm sure will be something other than google in very short order. I'm quite surprised they are using adsense at all really.

Meeting new people is one of the better uses of it. I've met plenty of girls via Myspace when travelling.