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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 10 Hansard (5 December) . . Page.. 2677 ..

MR CONNOLLY (continuing):

Parliament House in Sydney. Conservative Ministers from New South Wales in recent years have hopped into me for allowing the sale of X videos in the ACT. I consider myself proven right by the findings of the royal commission, which has indeed confirmed that this material was circulating illicitly in New South Wales.

Mr Humphries's proposals here follow from the Commonwealth's recently enacted new classification legislation. That attracted some attention last year when the ACT had originally been saying that we were not convinced that there should be a total ban on X computer games, although at the end of the day the then Chief Minister and I agreed that we would go along with uniformity on that and say that there should be no X-rated computer games. That reflects the Commonwealth legislation and the ACT legislation.

Mr Humphries, in his speech, referred to a proposal that he has floated with his colleagues that the X classification be looked at again. That is something that I would endorse. This was something that we also proposed last year - that X should perhaps be done away with and replaced. Mr Humphries is saying that it should be replaced with E, for erotica. I was then saying that it should be replaced with NVE, for non-violent erotica. I think it matters little what the title is; but the problem is that when X was first introduced, back in the 1980s, the original X classification did allow some quite violent and unpleasant material. That was removed in the early 1990s. The current classification for X makes it very clear that violent material or material suggesting non-consensual sexual activities simply cannot get an X rating.

It would be very interesting for members to get a compilation of scenes from R or even MA material and scenes from X material. I suspect that not members of this place - because they assiduously read their legislation - but certainly members of the Canberra community would see scenes from MA material and think that they were from X material. Scenes of rape and scenes of violent sexual activity, provided they are not explicit to a very defined degree, can be shown in MA and R material but simply cannot be shown in X material. The proposal that the Government has now announced, which is similar to the one that we were proposing to Ministers last year, is to really revamp that, get away from the old debate about X, and take a more realistic approach to what is circulating.

Mr Speaker, I think that that proposal is even more important this year than last year, and it was more important last year than the year before, because the fact is that modern technology is simply getting away from the old censorship laws. Not only can material be rapidly duplicated in video, but modern forms of computer technology are now making the old distinctions that film classifiers adopted really quite meaningless. The whole contentious issue last year about whether you allowed X-rated computer games focused on the ability to have a clear distinction between a computer game and a film. That distinction is getting more and more difficult to make. Films are now appearing in the CD-ROM format. Films are appearing in which you can choose a range of endings at various points. The distinction between a game and a film that has multiple choices is causing great difficulty.

I have been told that the Commonwealth censor has recently approved as a film a product called Glamour Photographer, or words to that effect. You get a CD-ROM and the person playing the computer game is the "photographer". There are a range of options. The over-18 female model disrobes and gets into a variety of poses for the photographer.

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