Australia, like all countries (including the United States), has rules that restrict or ban the production, sale, and distribution of some creative works, including magazines, movies, television computer games, web site content, live theatre, and other forms.

Table of contents
1 History
2 Current Situation
3 Video Pornography
4 The Internet
5 Video Games
6 Racial Vilification Laws
7 Current Controversies

History

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Current Situation

Currently, Australia's censorship regime is largely the purview of the Office of Film and Literature Classification, a Federal Government body. All feature films, videos, television shows (exempting news, current affairs, and documentaries), computer games, and some magazines (those that contain sexual content) for commercial release are required to be submitted to this body, made up of "community representatives" appointed by the government for two-year (??) terms. Some films (those made for educational or training purposes, for instance) are exempt from classification under certain conditions.

The classification system for visual content is largely standardised for television, videos, and feature films. The current guidelines, which have changed relatively little over the past few years, may be summarised as follows:

Any film that does not meet the above guidelines for any category is "Refused Classification" and the distribution and exhibition of such carries heavy maximum penalties involving, potentially, both fines and gaol.

Australian commercial network television screens only G-rated material from 3:30 until 7:30 p.m., up to PG-rated until 8:30 p.m., and only M-rated until 9:30 p.m.. R-rated material is never shown on broadcast television in Australia. In practice, Australian television is considerably more relaxed about sex and coarse language than American networks.

Enforcement of classification rules is through an agreement between the Federal and the six state and two territory governments, so the state police would be involved in the arrest and prosecution of anybody violating the classification rules.

Video Pornography

All the states actually go further than Commonwealth law requires and (theoretically) ban the sale of X-rated material, though possessing it and ordering it from elsewhere is quite legal. Therefore, all legal sale of X-rated material in Australia occurs by mail order from Canberra in Australian Capital Territory. In practice, it is widely believed that many sex shops carry extensive stocks of X-rated videos illegally; state police have shown no inclination to stop the trade.

Restrictions on the "X" category of videos were tightened in 2000 (including the restrictions on portrayal of fetishes, and of actors who appear to be minors), after failed attempts by the Howard government to ban the category entirely, and then replace it with a new "NVE" category which would have had similar restrictions.

In practice, it is likely that many consumers of material of the banned material simply switched to the Internet to obtain it.

The Internet

Australia's laws on internet censorship are, theoretically, amongst the most restrictive in the Western world. However, the restrictive nature of the laws has been combined with almost complete disinterest in enforcement from the agencies responsible for doing so.

A collection of both federal and state laws apply, but the most important is the federal legislation which came into effect on January 1, 2000. Under this regime, if a complaint is issued about material "on the internet" the Australian Broadcasting Authority is empowered to examine the material under the guidelines for film and video. If the material would be classified R or X and the site does not have an adult verification system, or would be refused classification, and is hosted in Australia, the ABA is empowered to issue a "takedown notice" under which the material must be removed from the site. If the site is hosted outside Australia, the site is added to a list of banned sites. This list of banned sites is then added to filtering software, which must be offered to all consumers by their Internet Service Providers. Consumers are have not required to install such filtering software.

A number (but reputedly very few) takedown notices have been issued to some Australian-hosted websites. According to Electronic Frontiers Australia in at least one documented case, the hosting was merely shifted to a server in the United States, and the DNS records updated so that consumers may never have noticed the change. As far as foreign-hosted content goes, small numbers of complaints have reportedly been issued. Consumer takeup of filtering software has been minimal, and pornography of all kinds remains freely available on the World Wide Web from foreign sites. The Internet outside the World Wide Web also continues unaffected, with Usenet binaries continuing to be hosted locally.

Various state governments have laws that theoretically ban the transmission of any material "unsuitable for minors". They have never been enforced, and in the opinion of EFA are completely unenforceable.

Video Games

Controversy in the early 1990s over games like Doom and Mortal Kombat saw the introduction of a classification scheme for video games.

The current scheme features ratings of "G", "G8+", "M", and "MA", which correspond to "G", "PG", "M", and "MA" in the movie classifications.

A few computer games have required modification to be sold in Australia, notably Carmageddon, Duke Nukem, and Grand Theft Auto:Vice City. This has been the subject of complaint in the gaming community, on the basis that there is no reason why adults should not be able to see content in games that they would see in a film. The various governments concerned seem unlikely to change the policy in the short term, however.

In at least some cases, "cracks" reintroducing the modified behaviour or imagery have circulated widely in the gaming community.

Racial Vilification Laws

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Current Controversies

Heated debates about classification occur on occasions, however the outright banning of films is quite rare. Since 1995, a total of five films have been banned, a notable example being Salo. However, starting in 2000 with the film Romance a new crop of "arthouse" films that feature short scenes of actual sex have begun to attract closer scrutiny and in two controversial cases have been banned. The two banned films are Baise-Moi, a French film about two prostitutes who take violent revenge after being raped, and Ken Park, an American film about teenagers that features a scene of autoerotic asphyxiation, amongst other sexually-explicit scenes.

The banning of Ken Park has attracted considerable media attention and political protest. Prominent movie reviewer Margaret Pomeranz, host of The Movie Show on the SBS network, was arrested (and later cautioned and released) along with several others after attempting to screen what she described as "a wonderful film" at a hall. Copies of the movie, as of July 2003, are circulating widely on various file sharing networks such as Gnutella, and there have been reports of many private screenings. Tom Gleisner, host of The Panel (a prime-time comedy/panel discussion show), openly admitted on the show that he had downloaded and watched the film.

New South Wales Premier Bob Carr has stated that he thinks that the banning of Ken Park and other films is inappropriate, and his Attorney-General, Bob Debus, will discuss changing the laws with other state Attorneys-General at an upcoming meeting.

  • Topics still to do:

  • magazine classification, notably its effect on manga.