This ALRC review was a disgrace. The terms of reference suggested this review would have been a complete examination of the underlying assumptions of the Classification Scheme, and whether they are still, or ever were relevant. Instead, we got a report with little evidence that happened, and simplistic, ill-thought out recommendations for concentrating power in the Commonwealth and centralising the scheme.

The question of whether a Classification Scheme should also function as a Censorship Scheme was not seriously addressed.

The problems associated with mob mentality and community standards was not seriously addressed. It is simply not possible to generate an accurate representation of "community standards" while controversial, but legally produced, material is effectively banned or repressed and there is large social pressure on people to say what is expected in public as opposed to what they actually do in private. "Community standards" is therefore effectively a meaningless term.

The Media Effects Model and its obvious influence on the current Classification Scheme was not addressed. No serious consideration seems to have been given to the obvious flaws with this model, and what that means for concepts like 'harm' that the Scheme is based on.

There appears to have been little consideration given to the dangers of concentrating so much censorship power in the Commonwealth, considering that every decision on matters of censorship since the current scheme was put in place has been to further restrict what Australians can experience.

- Cont -

Only token lip service seems to have been paid to address the large technological problems associated with controlling the Internet in anything like the manner that most people expect. This has given the Government leverage to control what Australians can experience (e.g. Wikileaks), while doing nothing to prevent criminals actually interested in illegal material. It's also again conflating classification with censorship.

The scope of the 'Prohibited' category is still vague and will be abused the way the 'Refused Classification' category currently is. This is, of course, a requirement of censorship schemes, because they work best when citizens don't know if what they're doing is actually illegal or not, so that you self-censor to be well away from any controversial topics.

All-in-all, a large disappointment that is hopefully ignored. At least the current scheme is increasingly losing respect and collapsing around itself. It'll have to be addressed sometime in the near future. Adopting the ALRC's recommendations, however, would leave us with another awful scheme for the next 20 years.

I too think that the ALRC review was a lost opportunity. Its recommendations will do little to provide children and parents with evidence-based, impartial and consistent information about the content of media they might choose. It's parents and children who should be the main beneficiaries of any classification system. They should be able to gain reliable advice about content to support enjoyable experiences and to avoid the potentially harmful.
What the ALRC is pushing is a system that includes all media content being classified in the same way (a computer game experience is the same as a DVD?), a strong emphasis on the high end of the classification scale for compulsory classification (which can be justified), but allows industry to choose whether to classify content that children will mostly access.
The ALRC has refused argument that the present classification categories do not support the effective provision of information about age-appropriate content. The Netherlands kijkwijzer system provides a good model of an evidence-based consistent classification system that actually supports informed parental choice. Ongoing surveys have found it really helps parents and they use it. But we will be stuck with G, PG, M ... because people are familiar with it!