Page 1745 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 18 August 1992
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I seriously doubt that, as an ACT legislature, we could move to introduce a new form of censorship. There is that constitutional point that the Commonwealth Parliament has reserved to itself the issue of censorship. I guess we could argue that a law relating to the way such magazines are displayed in blinder racks would simply be a law relating to method of display, not censorship. But again, I would say that it would be rather foolish for us to head down that path. If you had to identify a society or a part of Australia that had problems of sexual repression, of sexual offences, of teenage pregnancies in Australia in recent decades, you would look at Queensland in the seventies, when Joh was making a public fool of himself and the community with his Queensland edition of Playboy and the rest. Historically, societies that are obsessed about pure images and that are obsessed about censorship tend to be those societies that are most repressive. One harks back to Victorian England and obsessions about piano legs being covered, masking a society in which women were certainly significantly repressed and in which inappropriate sexual behaviour was rampant.
Openness is something that we value in our free and democratic society. Unfortunately, that openness means often that images that we may find personally unpleasant or inappropriate will be found. I was unsuccessful in trying to track down the source of a particular quote, so I cannot appear to be terribly learned and cite the author. But someone once said that the only freedom that really counts is the freedom to express an idea or a thought which you disagree with. Everyone is in favour of freedom when the freedom that is being exercised is something that we all find pleasant or agreeable. The only freedom that really counts is the freedom to express an idea or a concept that the individual who values that freedom disagrees with.
I certainly find disagreeable, as I suspect all members would, the sort of imagery that is displayed in these fairly trashy magazines. But I do not think we should be intervening by force of law. In a sense, all that does is give additional credibility or notoriety to those magazines. I think we should give the tighter censorship guidelines that were introduced in June a chance to operate. There has been, I believe, a significant change in the type of imagery that is pictured on the front pages of those magazines, although still it is imagery that most of us would find, with reason, degrading or demeaning. One always has to decide at what point to legislate and at what point to try to agitate for change in community expectations tastes, so that there is just not a demand for this type of thing. That is the approach that we would favour.
This is, quite properly, a matter of public importance. We would agree with Ms Szuty that the ACT Assembly should recognise community concern about this type of material - and we do - and we will continue with our approach, which is to raise the status of women within the community and to try to beat this material by education rather than repression.
MR HUMPHRIES (3.34): Madam Speaker, I get the impression that there are two Terry Connollys running around Canberra at the moment: The one that was running around at the end of March this year and a second one that is now rising in this place today to make supportive sounds about the way in which this community should be dealing with magazines of the kind that are the subject of today's matter of public importance. I want to remind the Minister of what he said about this issue when it was raised originally by Mr Moore at the end of
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