https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/have-your-say/modernising-australias-national-classification-scheme-stage-2-reforms
Ever been irritated by petty Australian Government censorship[1]? Well, the Australian Government is running a consultation on that. You have a chance to have a say on the matter.

If there are other areas of censorship which you'd like addressed, you can tackle those as well. I am simply covering in this post what comes to mind for me. The two main ones being the particular brand of puritanism which the government has sometimes had, and the irrational fear of games containing "drugs and alcohol" (even going as far as banning these entirely at times). There was also a game which was censored which appeared to allow players to perform drone strikes on tanks, perhaps due to fears of this seeming too similar to the situation in Ukraine (the precise classification appeared to be "criminal instructions" or something to that effect).

While what is happening to the folks from Ukraine is most despicable, and war more generally is tragic, I don't think there is any justification for this sort of censorship. There should be a strong presumption against censoring fictional content in general.

For violence, animated violence should probably be rated a bit to somewhat lower than more realistic violence. It doesn't make a lot of sense to treat these the same (unless the rating is low enough that it doesn't matter).

For sexual content, I have a couple of recommendations here:

1) If it involves a fictional character who doesn't exist (i.e. #anime / manga), there shouldn't ever be a reason to issue a RC rating. At most, maybe a R18 rating. A lower degree of eroticism or nudity (not really porn) might be present in anime and I think any rating should avoid rating that highly. It doesn't matter what the fictional character looks like.

I feel that muddling reality and fiction here really diminishes the seriousness of things like abuse. There also isn't a scientific basis for that sort of censorship, [2] goes into that (and other related matters). Some sort of sex education (perhaps around respecting someone's boundaries) might be better than relying on crude censorship which does not appear to be effective (and has harmful drawbacks of it's own, including even a harmful "War on Drugs" type phenomena when taken to an extreme).

2) For content containing real human actors, as a rule of thumb, if the content is produced with the (obviously adult) actor's consent, it should be permitted. If there is to be any limitation, it should involve an objective standard of serious physical harm, rather than the remote possibility that someone might be offended by the content. You also have to be wary of the Board construing this far too broadly though by deciding that a very mundane activity might have a remote possibility of physical harm. They've done this in the past (as has the British one).

Neither of these two recommendations mean that every site has to carry every possible kind of content.

As a rule of thumb, you might want online content to be treated far more liberally than content to be broadcasted on TV. If you're not careful, they might try to impose stricter TV standards outside of that context, despite them being inappropriate. I don't think that is what people would expect. Online, in particular, tends to be more oriented around curating your own experience, than relying on a broad brush one-size-fits-all solution.

In regards to the government wanting higher classifications for "simulated gambling", I'd be wary of construing terms like simulated gambling very broadly and assuming any game which contains it is primarily focused on gambling (or contains things like loot boxes). As an example, classic Pokémon games had a building in one city which had gambling machines. These elements made up a tiny portion of the game and the vast majority of gameplay does not involve these.

1 https://refused-classification.com Many examples of petty censorship (even containing dramatic sounding excuses for what is essentially mundane everyday content).

2 https://qoto.org/@olives/111888946356326887

#auspol #FreeExpression