The Null Device

2007/4/15

Australia's state governments have unanimously condemned the government's decision to appoint a friend of the Prime Minister to run the Office of Film and Literature Censorship. The new head, Donald McDonald, is former head of the ABC, the now neutered and compliant state broadcaster:

Raena Lea-Shannon, a media lawyer and spokeswoman for lobby group Watch on Censorship, said the move was linked to the Government's desire to clamp down on literature that incites or instructs terrorism. "It fits into a fairly obvious pattern of a strong desire to take control over classification … we should be worried about this because it has a chilling effect on freedom," she said.
Another fact that emerges from the article: the OFLC used to be an independent body, but has since been absorbed into the federal Attorney-General's Department. For which there could well be a perfectly rational explanation, though it certainly looks like a move to politicise the mechanism of censorship and media control in Australia. Given the government's equivocal stand on freedom of expression (banning or attempting to ban films which offend the religious right like Baise-Moi and Mysterious Skin and seizing and deporting anti-war activists, whilst stridently defending freedom of speech when it's the speech of sympathetic right-wingers like Alan Jones), it certainly looks troubling.

australia authoritarianism censorship culture war politics 0