Worth Richard: Films Videos and Publications Classification Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Worth Richard: Films Videos and Publications Classification Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:615;Page:11459] 
RICHARD WORTH (National—Epsom) 
: 
 We have been treated by the previous speaker to an illuminating insight into the key passages of this bill and also into the provisions that the Government believes are the key provisions deserving the attention of the Government Administration Committee. I say from the outset that National will support this bill going to a select committee. We do so though conscious of the fact that this legislation contains significant changes and that what has been a settled understanding of quite difficult provisions may well be disturbed by the use of new statutory language; also settled case law may be put on one side. So National seeks an assurance from the Minister that if inconsistencies or injustices are revealed when this legislation is passed the Government will forthwith implement remedial legislation to deal with those issues. In a circumstance where it seems likely that the life of this Government is moving to a close National can give a similar assurance that if inconsistencies are revealed when it comes to office in 2005 it will on a prompt basis implement remedial legislation. 
The previous speaker spoke about a balance that needs to be struck: on the one hand the right of freedom of speech and on the other hand the necessity to set appropriate bounds in the context of the criminal law and public policy considerations. Pornography is an example of an issue that has grown very quickly from a state of insignificance to become a major social issue at least in some parts of the world. From the very beginning in the early 1960s of what has been termed the modern pornography wave there has been controversy over nearly all aspects of the topic and only one aspect of that topic is the issue of balancing of interests. 
 Members will know that erotic art is probably as old as art itself and that sexual themes appear in the artistic creations of all times and cultures. The first erotic paintings sculptures and writings were probably produced in the early youth of humanity and every milestone in the arts usually saw new developments in the field of erotica. It was Johann Gutenberg who developed the art of printing in around 1448. One of the very first books to appear in print was  
Il Decamerone 
 Boccacio’s erotic work. Of course what happened immediately after that was that there was suppression of freedom of the press. The next giant step towards mass media production was the invention of the photographic process in 1832. There were similar consequences because 40 years later in 1874 130000 obscene photographs and 5000 slides were seized by police in a raid on two houses in London owned by a photographer called Henry Hayler. When Edison invented moving pictures the pornographic potential of that new media was of course too obvious to be overlooked. Very soon a prosperous underground production of blue movies began particularly in South America. 
So we move to today where as the previous speaker has said we face a wave of pornography through the spread of the Internet. I was interested to read material that was reported on ABC Online on 13 January 2004. It was an interview with the writer of a report John Carr in London. The first point he noted was that child pornography crime had risen fifteenfold since 1988. That is an enormous increase. In the course of the interview he was asked about this very tricky issue of the linkage between child pornography and child crime. He noted there were two sources of reasonable information to establish that causal connection. The first was interviews that he had had with paedophiles themselves. He spoke about a clinic in the UK called the Lucy Faithful Foundation which treats convicted sex offenders. It was clear from what those sex offenders said that they had been influenced by exposure to child pornography material. But there is also some objective data. The United States Postal Inspection Service did an analysis of everyone it had arrested from 1997 till the end of 2003. Over 2000 men had been arrested and the analysis found that 35 percent of them were also hands-on abusers. So I think there is a fair basis of evidence in the literature and anecdotally to make the particular connection between child pornography and unlawful sexual activity. 
We come then to the Films Videos and Publications Classification Amendment Bill. I have already said that National will support this legislation going to the select committee. It is appropriate that there be a review of this legislation because after all the principal Act has been in operation for 9 years—the Films Videos and Publications Classification Act 1993. It was the start of a unified regime for the censorship and classification of printed material of film and of other publications. Three things have happened since then that provide in the view of National justification for this amendment bill. 
The first and the one that the previous speaker has referred to is the availability and use of the Internet. That has of course prompted on an international basis legal measures to address the exploitation of children. I need only refer to the Optional Protocol to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children Child Prostitution and Child Pornography. We signed that protocol so we had an obligation as a matter of international law to line up our domestic law with it. We have done so or have sought to do so—certainly in connection with this bill. 
The second aspect is that the Ministry of Justice undertook a review in 2003 of the current offence provisions and enforcement powers contained in the principal Act and that review concluded that the existing penalties simply do not reflect the seriousness of some offending particularly that involving child pornography. 
The third aspect which was also before the Government Administration Committee concerns the recent decision of the Court of Appeal in a case called  
Living Word Distributors Ltd 
 v  
Human Rights Action Group 
. The Court of Appeal said that for material to be “objectionable” which is one of the statutory words in the legislation it must fall within the scope of a subject matter gateway and that the subject matter limitation was designed to limit the reach of the censorship laws. The court said—and this was seen to be by many a gap—that publications could be banned under the Act only if they dealt with sex horror crime cruelty violence or other similar matters. So one of the things that this bill does is seek to deal with that gap identified in the Court of Appeal decision. 
What does the bill do? The main reforms of the bill are dealt with in the explanatory note and I am not going to deal with them in any detail. Suffice it to say that we see in this bill a raft of changes. We see the extension of the scope of “trading or commercial” offences. We see an increase in maximum penalties. We see the creation of a new offence punishable by up to 2 years’ imprisonment of possession of an objectionable publication knowing or having reasonable cause to believe that it is objectionable. We also see the removal of doubt that nude or partially nude images of children can reasonably be caught and classified as “objectionable” by the censors.