When this story first hit, the focus was on Prezza’s mock-Tudor beams and Blears’s capital gains tax. It looked like another nail in Labour’s coffin, but instead of cacophonous Tory savagery filling the slipstream, there was silence. And for the obvious reason that MPs across the party political spectrum would have been inevitably labelled hypocrites if they attemped to lambast Labour – this story has shifted from the usual political point-winning into a maddeningly pointless attack on politicians in general from the media.

Just as it’s so much easier to generate public interest in the recession if there’s a bogeyman like Fred Goodwin to rally around, it’s so much easier to use politics to sell papers if the focus is on something digestible like expenses. Rather than attempt to articulate policy direction in layman’s terms, just before European parliamentary elections, the papers are cynically manipulating public distrust in elected officials. What a tonic that is for the country. And the only ones set to win are parties with no MPs to make expense claims, like the BNP.

Yesterday’s showdown between two public servants, Carrie Gracie from BBC News 24 and Michael Foulkes, in which Foulkes demanded Grace reveal her salary of £92,000, served to show just how crazy it is to attack only MPs on this issue. Broaden the net to anyone who has the public’s interests at heart, from building contractors to private doctors to, yes, journalists, and expenses becomes an issue too big to manage. Keep it in its little sweet spot of antagonism towards MPs though, and it becomes a debate that people will pay to read.

The real issue should be abuse of the system, a la Derek Conway who paid his two sons as researchers to research, presumably, secret areas of Xbox games and YouTube’s funniest animals. But labelling all expense claims as bogus, which the blanket coverage by the newspapers is in danger of doing, pointlessly undermines the trust we have in politicians. And after seeing one MPs six-month diary recently, with its constant 80-100 hour weeks, I’m quite happy for them to have a comfortable garden to relax in very occasionally while they keep the country running. Transparency is needed, so that it doesn’t take a freedom of information request to find out what MPs are spending – that way MPs won’t be tempted to go for the gold taps when the regular ones will do. But restrictions that will actively hamper and demoralise MPs, borne out of self-serving, overzealous media attention, won’t help anyone but the media themselves.

Meanwhile, here are some more stories involving public funds today. The UK government is in danger of spending £500m in penalties for not making payments on the Eurofighter jets it ordered. Guy Hands has moved to Guernsey to avoid paying tax. The Bank of England could increase its quantitative easing program amid worries about inflation – last time it used quantitative easing, it increased the national debt by £75bn. Meanwhile the amount of expenses paid back hasn’t yet reached £100,000. The media must move on from personality-led politics, and towards educating the country on what the bulk of their tax money is being spent on, and what their votes will mean.

Wikileaks has been at the centre of a number of high-profile information-sharing cases, the most recent being the publication of the BNP member address list and the leaked memos on Barclays’ tax avoidance. For the latter, applause – these were documents that laid bare the complexity of Barclays efforts to avoid supporting the country. For the former, boos – whatever you think about the BNP, it’s an invasion of privacy to have your political affiliations, which many people regard as deeply personal, pushed out into the open. The BNP’s members aren’t necessarily racist or xenophobic, and to put them on a list encouraged whitewashing of the issue.

Now with this Australian blacklist, there are similar charges of compromised civil liberties, with blocked sites weirdly including innocent destinations like a dentist’s office and a kennels. The idea of blocking access to certain websites is argued by Wikileaks to be undemocratic – they accused Australia of ”acting like a democratic backwater” with the list. The way Theodor Reppe, the owner of the site, had his home raided was personally damaging – the German authorities painted it as a search for child pornography, as Wikileaks publishes lists of blocked sites that include child pornography links.

Wikileaks says: “once a secret censorship system is established for pornographic content the same system can rapidly expand to cover other material, including political material” – they published a Thailand blacklist that featured sites criticising the Thai royal family.

All quite compelling. But it’s interesting when you learn that the dentist’s office website, that allegedly proves Australia’s internet suppression extends beyond child pornography, had its server hacked by a porn website and was redirecting users to their site, hence the ban from the government. If you take a look down the list of sites blocked to Australia’s people, the URLs alone make for uncomfortable reading, and are compelling evidence for a blacklist. If a dentist’s office that couldn’t keep their security in order appears on it, then it’s a small price for protecting users from child pornography.

Even more morally dubious is Wikileaks actually posting clickable links to all blocked child porn sites on its website – “If the customer is presented with a “STOP!” page, the site is still listed in the filter.” This is surely the most wrongheaded reaction imaginable – when you start to argue for free speech by disseminating child pornography, you know your argument has lost legitimacy.

Depressingly, the Australian blacklist that’s caused all this fuss is, according to one internet filterer, hopelessly out of date, with two thirds of the links dormant and the whole list only representing 0.2% of illegal pornographic material. To hamper efforts to combat this problem with accusations over mild limits on freedom is again wrongheaded.

The raid of Reppe may be overkill, and symptomatic of the apparent “hysteria” gripping Germany over paedophilia, but blacklists can surely be managed by an independent body to ensure there isn’t a creeping infringement upon civil liberties. But it’s another example of paranoia and kneejerk distrust, just as there was with Google’s Street View launch last week. Some “infringements” are useful when you’re trying to find your way round some bizarre street system, as in the case of Street View, and important when trying to combat abuse, in the case of blacklists. When it comes to protecting children, the paranoid howlings of Wikileaks should be kept to a low volume.