Page 3136 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 20 September 1994
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There is no doubt that this legislation largely targets the effects on young people and children, and that is why it is all the more valuable in preventing adults exploiting children. There is no doubt whatsoever that this type of material that is categorised under various areas has an educative effect on children, particularly on young minds. This legislation will carry a strong message to those people involved in the potential manufacture, carrying, hire, display et cetera, of this form of material. Once again, I commend the Minister and those people responsible for it.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General and Minister for Health) (4.19), in reply: I thank members for their general support for this legislation. This is an area, as Ms Szuty says, where there is an awful lot happening, and that is perhaps inevitable. In the days when publication of material was either in printed form or an image on celluloid - it took a long time to produce and was slow to distribute - one certain regime of censorship law was possible. In the age of videotape, rapid distribution and now computers, and interlinked computers - we read about the information superhighway in the United States - there are enormous challenges for governments that are concerned to not prevent the rapid dissemination of worthwhile information but, on the other hand, to impose and protect certain community standards.
The issue of video games was one that emerged fairly quickly in Australia. It is one that I have been interested in for some time - in fact, since I had the opportunity to go to the United States last year on the parliamentary exchange program - because while I was in America in April of last year there was enormous debate raging about one particular computer game which had just been released there and which involved aliens who invade a house; scantily clad young women are in the house; and the aliens variously disembowel or otherwise violently deal with the young women in the house. The aim of the game is to protect the young women. One could well imagine that the sort of imagery was quite disturbing. What was disturbing about this game was that it was the first commercial release of the realistic true image. It was as good an image as you would see on a good video screen. It was not the sort of stick figures that we are used to seeing on computer games. The debate was raging in America.
When I came back to Australia and went to a SCAG meeting, and there was some discussion about this, it was an issue that I could see was very important. It is one on which the ACT has worked very closely, I must say, with John Hannaford from New South Wales and with Michael Lavarch. We have been working very closely here to get this package through and to get the new model package coming through. There have been some difficulties. Everyone immediately agreed that we should ban certain images on computer games. We had some reservations about R- and X-rated. There is going to be an inconsistency whatever happens, Mr Humphries, because everybody else has said, "We are banning R-rated for computer games as well". But everybody accepts R-rated movies. There will be an inconsistency whatever you do. A majority of this house and the Northern Territory take a certain view on X-rated movies. Other people in the house might take a different view; but, at the end of the day, the ACT went along with the national view that we ban both R- and X-rated. But then there were some problems.
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