Australians are too-often unaware just how rigorous a censorship regime has always been imposed on our country. In the 1960s, Lady Chatterly’s Lover was a cause celebre of the Australian left, but in the 1980s the left began to jump into bed with the censors.
Now, they want the dead hand of censorship to extend its reach back into the past, and retroactively censor old movies, books and TV shows. Their target is not pornography, but children’s books and TV comedies they deem suddenly ‘offensive’.
The [Classification Board] wants to reclassify publications every 10 years, it has told a review of Australia’s classification scheme. Citing the British censor’s reclassification of classic children’s film Mary Poppins last year, the Australian censor says it needs new powers to proactively reclassify “archaic and out-of-step’’ movies, books and TV shows that “no longer align with the current guidelines or community standards’’.
Currently, the board can reclassify material only at the request of the federal communications minister, two years after making its initial decision.
It now wants to initiate its own reviews based on “ongoing complaints, requests or enquiries’’.
In other words, every time some mentally ill man in a dress, race-baiter, or swivel-eyed follower of the Prophet gets their little knickers in a twist.
Such a move could fuel the “cancel culture” that has forced edits or the shelving of popular children’s books by Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton and Dr Seuss because of concerns about racism, sexism and body-shaming.
Vintage film – including some episodes of popular British TV comedy series Fawlty Towers and the 1939 blockbuster movie Gone with the Wind – has been cancelled or given trigger warnings by streaming services for racism.
On the upside, such labels could backfire, like the ‘Parental Advisory’ labels on records in the 1980s. Far from deterring record-buyers, the labels became a brand that declared, ‘This is the Good Stuff’.
But the track record of the Classification Board is the clearest warning against giving it any further powers.
From the 1920s to the 1980s, hundreds of books and films were banned by the Classification Board, ranging from Lolita and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, to The Catcher in the Rye and The Naked Lunch. From the 1980s, thousands of films and videos were heavily cut or banned outright. Early VHS copies of The Toxic Avenger became collector’s editions after it was recalled and heavily censored. The first run of punk band I Spit on Your Gravy’s first album, St Kilda’s Alright, was banned and confiscated from record stores.
Who’d want to give these cat’s-bum-mouthed, dickhead wowsers the power to retroactively alter the past, like an Orwellian Minitrue?
The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed... Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered – George Orwell, “1984’’
American actor Jennifer Aniston has called out the trend of “cancel culture’’, telling the Wall Street Journal in 2023 that “there’s a whole generation of people, kids, who are now going back to episodes of ‘Friends’ and find(ing) them offensive’’.
The British Board of Film Classification gave the Oscar-winning film Mary Poppins a U rating – for universal audience – upon its release in 1964 and again in 2013. In 2024, it slapped a PG (parental guidance) rating on the film for using “discriminatory language’’.
The censor found the film twice used the discriminatory word “Hottentots’’ – a historical English reference to nomadic peoples of southern Africa – when referring to soot-faced chimney sweeps.
As if anyone under 60 would even know what a Hottentot was.
Well, the Classification Board is determined to make sure that they never get the chance to find out.
