"...Yet the Office of Film and Literature Classification will soon be hunting for men and women with the amazing ability to pick the books, films, symphonies, news broadcasts, sitcoms and sermons that "might lead a person (regardless of his or her age or any mental impairment) to engage in a terrorist act".
Philip Ruddock wants all such works banned. We are not defenceless now. For years this country has suppressed any works that "promote, incite or instruct in matters of crime or violence" but the Attorney-General fears that formula is too slack. With his lawyer's mind he sees the risk of insidious material slipping through the net to inspire the naive and impressionable.
It's over a year since he first tried to persuade the state and territory attorneys-general to accept this new rule banning "advocacy" of terrorism. They jacked up, alarmed by the sweeping powers he wanted to give the censors.
When the attorneys meet again in Hobart at the end of this week, Ruddock will once more be insisting his new rule be adopted by the states and territories. If they don't - and several states are still holding out - he has a bill ready and waiting to override the nation's supposedly co-operative censorship arrangements. "I am not prepared," Ruddock told Parliament in June, "to wait indefinitely to address this problem."
But what is the problem, asked the Australian Press Council, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and the Law Council of Australia in submissions to Ruddock's department over the past few months? Promoting terrorism is already banned, so why do we need new rules to suppress urging, advocating and praising?"
Labels: censorship, new fascism
