Page 2786 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 21 November 1989
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Queensland Literature Board of Review. It described its charter in these words:
"... the object of censorship is not to protect the individual from moral corruption" but rather "to protect and defend the very fabric of society's existence".
Now, what he says is that the Queensland Literature Board of Review, in order to protect the very fabric of society's existence, banned the film Pretty Baby and banned the sayings of Chairman Mao collected in The Little Red School Book, and indeed, for the same reasons, banned the journal of the Marijuana Party of Australia. They had under - - -
Mr Jensen: On a point of order, Mr Speaker; I know you have already ruled on this particular matter but it just seems to me that I have not heard the word "tax" mentioned once in the first five minutes of the Minister's speech.
MR WHALAN: At one stage, Mr Speaker, they had under active review - - -
MR SPEAKER: Order! Minister, please resume your seat. Mr Jensen, thank you for your point of order. Please proceed and stay close to the point, Minister.
MR WHALAN: They had under review a book which had been referred to them, entitled The Rape of our Land, and it was not until somebody had got past the third page that they discovered it was about soil erosion. That is typical of the sort of problem we have.
The problem that censorship faces is the determination of the impact. This particular document of Dr Wilson's is a serious attempt to explore the research and the literature on the impact of the portrayal of explicit sex on behaviour. It does that very, very effectively. In the process of that, he reviewed areas of experimental studies, field studies and commissions of inquiry. He said there are studies and studies, one upon the other, that he refers to in his literature. Only one study reviewed reported more aggression by subjects after exposure to pornography.
He went further to review the Kutchinsky study of sex crimes in Denmark between 1959 and 1970. That study demonstrated that large decreases in child molestation were directly attributed to the availability of hard-core pornography during that period. That research was further reviewed by, to quote him, "the most thorough and painstaking inquiry into pornography and its effects conducted by Professor Bernard Williams for the British Government in 1979".
He said that Professor Williams came to the conclusion that there had been a dramatic reduction in reported sexual offences against children and that this decrease coincided with the sudden upsurge in the availability of pornography.
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