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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 9 Hansard (23 November) . . Page.. 2318 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

films and computer games. Classification decisions are to be made in accordance with the National Classification Code and the classification guidelines that help apply the code. Both the code and the guidelines must be agreed between the Commonwealth, States and Territories.

The Commonwealth Act will not be brought into force until complementary State and Territory legislation is enacted. The State and Territory legislation will, in effect, govern the submission of films, publications and computer games to the Classification Board for classification. It will also deal with the consequences of the different classifications given by the board to films, publications and computer games. Western Australia, South Australia, New South Wales, the Northern Territory, Tasmania and Victoria have already introduced similar legislation.

The Bill covers much the same matter as is covered by the current Publications Control Act and the Film Classification Act. The structure of the offence provisions, however, will be more uniform with the legislation of the States and the Northern Territory. One area of significant difference from current laws is the treatment of the classification of publications. The majority of publications, which do not contain material that would be regarded by most people as offensive, do not require classification. Only those publications that deal with sex, drugs, nudity or violence such that they are likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult are required to be classified under the new arrangements. These publications are called "submittable publications".

This manner of dealing with the classification of publications is different from the current arrangements under the Publications Control Act. Under the current Act, it is a defence to prosecution for an offence in respect of an unclassified objectionable publication if the defendant deals with the publication in a manner consistent with how it would be required to be treated if it had been classified. The classification of publications is voluntary. If distributors decide not to have the publication classified, then they must make the right decision about what the likely classification might be in order to avoid prosecution. In order to provide more certainty both for distributors of these types of publications and for enforcement authorities, this current scheme is replaced under the new national censorship scheme with the partially compulsory scheme of "submittable publications" as recommended by the Australian Law Reform Commission.

Mr Speaker, I would also like to mention specifically the position with regard to X-rated videos. This Bill preserves the current controls on the sale and distribution of X-rated videos. I have raised a proposal for a reconsideration of the current classifications for films and videos with my colleagues on the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General. The initial reaction of Ministers to the proposal at that forum was, I think, encouraging. The proposal concerns the "X" and "R" classifications. Under the proposal the most extreme violent material that is currently permissible in the "R" classification, together with material that combines both sex and violence from the current "R" classification, would be removed and placed into a new, what I call for the moment, "V" category. This material would not be banned but would be available only subject to the same type of restrictions that currently apply to the sale and distribution of "X" videos in the ACT. This new category of material would not be available from general video stores.

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