Page 3427 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 18 September 1991
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Even more insidiously, and this is a real cause of concern, creeping into those magazines now are ads about where you can get X-rated material in Sydney and Melbourne. The States where the ban on sale applies are the States where unclassified material is available. By forcing this stuff underground we are getting material in circulation which is extraordinarily damaging.
Mr Jensen in his diatribe seemed to suggest that the Labor Party takes a position that there should never ever be any censorship. That, of course, is nonsense. The view of the Labor Party, which Mr Berry was expressing and which I certainly share, as do other members here, is essentially the view of John Stuart Mill, and I would have thought Mr Humphries would be supportive of it. That is that an individual has the maximum degree of freedom until the point at which his freedom hurts another. The Commonwealth censorship laws have banned material that involves bestiality and child pornography.
Ms Follett: And violence.
MR CONNOLLY: As Ms Follett stresses, and I should have stressed it at the outset, violent sexual behaviour is banned. The material that has been allowed by the Commonwealth is specifically non-violent material. The material that is circulating widely in Sydney, Melbourne and other capital cities, where the States piously ban sale but allow possession and encourage advertising material to float around, is far worse. It is the unclassified material, the unlawful, illegal material, and that is an appalling situation. Censorship applies to draw a line. The line having been drawn by the Commonwealth censors, we see no reason to jump opportunistically into a political ban on that material.
Mr Berry's comments on film festivals were also twisted and distorted by Mr Jensen in his remarks. What Mr Berry said is essentially true and unarguable. If a person takes their clothes off and performs certain functions with another person with their clothes off, the question of when that becomes art and when it becomes pornography is really in the eye of the beholder. In the American Supreme Court, in one of the landmark censorship cases in the 1960s, a judge was heard to say, "I cannot define pornography, but I know it when I see it". That is the problem here. How can we define pornography?
In the text of Mr Stevenson's Bill, he would ban material which is either an X-rated film, or which, not being an X-rated film, "describes, depicts, expresses or otherwise deals with matters of sex ... in a manner that is likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult". It is almost notorious that films displayed at film festivals will often lead to vocal protest from community groups, who no doubt consider themselves to be reasonable adults and who claim to be offended by depictions of sex or sexuality in those
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