Censorship in New Zealand

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Censorship in New Zealand has changed over the years to reflect the demands for a more liberal application of the law on contentious publications.

The Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) is the government agency that is responsible for classification of all films, videos, publications, and some video games in New Zealand. It was created by the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993 and is an independent Crown Entity. The head of the OFLC is called the Chief Censor, maintaining a title that has described the government officer in charge of censorship in New Zealand since 1916.

Patricia Bartlett was a New Zealand conservative Catholic pro-censorship activist of the 1970s and 1980s and founded the Society for Promotion of Community Standards (SPCS). This organisation is still actively seeking tighter restrictions on the release of some publications.

Notable cases

The film All Quiet on the Western Front was banned in New Zealand as anti-war propaganda in 1930. It was eventually allowed to be shown with a few cuts made.^[1]

The "Censorship and Publicity Regulations" was passed in 1939 and used to prevent the dissemination of information deemed contrary to the national interest during World War II. For example, the newspaper of the Communist Party of New Zealand, The People's Voice, was seized in 1940.^[2] The Battle of Manners Street in 1943 was a riot involving American and New Zealand servicemen. No report of the event was permitted in local newspapers.^[3]

During the 1951 Waterfront dispute, it was illegal to publish material in support of the watersiders or their allies.^[4]

Policy shift: 1986- Present

After Parliament passed the Homosexual Law Reform Act 1986, New Zealand censorship regulatory bodies could not rely on previous case law and tribunal decisions based on the illegality of gay male sex. Accordingly, the Court of Appeal found that censorship regulators should base their decisions on evidence-based social scientific and medical research, in Howley versus Lawrence Publishing later that same year. As a consequence, film, video and publication censorship became increasingly standardised, and feminist academics came to dominate censorship policy administration^{[citation needed]}. This led to the passage of the Film Publications and Videos Act 1993, which merged the previously separate Indecent Publications Tribunal, Chief Film Censor and Video Recordings Authority into a single agency, the New Zealand Office of Film and Literature Classification.

During the eighties and nineties, an increasingly proactive LGBT New Zealand community fought several test cases that expanded Howley's precedent to encompass all government censorship regulatory bodies. The Society for Promotion of Community Standards lost all of these cases, whether before the Indecent Publications Tribunal, High Court, Court of Appeal or the later Office of Film and Literature Classification. Today, most lesbian and gay erotic media products that contain sexual imagery are labelled R18, available only to those eighteen years of age and over. While fetishist erotic media is similarly regulated, media that depict paedophilia, necrophilia, zoophilia, methamphetamine manufacture information and violent survivalist media are all prohibited in New Zealand.

Current controversies

The film Baise-moi, which contained violence and real rather than simulated sex by the actors, was banned from video release, following complaints laid by the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards.^[5]

Censorship is often called for by Christian influenced groups but in 2000 a complaint was made against two Christian videos that represented homosexuals and bisexuals as "inferior". The case was upheld.^[6] Family First New Zealand have called for the banning of violent video games, most notably Grand Theft Auto IV, among others.^[7]

T-shirts have been censored in New Zealand and in 2007 one that advertised an album for Cradle of Filth, a British extreme metal band, was banned by Bill Hastings, the chief censor in New Zealand. According to Hastings, it was one of the most graphic t-shirts he had ever seen. The shirt displayed an image of a mostly nude Roman Catholic nun sexually pleasuring herself, and with the text "Jesus is a Cunt".^[8][9]

In 2008 The Peaceful Pill Handbook, a book explaining how to carry out euthanasia, was initially banned in OFLC since it was deemed to be objectionable.^[10] In May 2008 it was allowed for sale if sealed and an indication of the censorship classification was displayed. Philip Nitschke, its author, had deleted content that might have directly assisted the suicide of others, which is an offence under New Zealand's Crimes Act 1961.^[11]

See also

• Internet censorship in New Zealand

References

Further reading

• Watson, Chris; Roy Shuker (1998). In the public good? Censorship in New Zealand. Palmerston North: The Dunmore Press. ISBN 0-86469-305-2. 

External links

• The Office of Film & Literature Classification
• Department of Internal Affairs - Censorship Compliance page
• Text of the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993