Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am compelled to respond to that summary from the opposition, which effectively distils 6½ years of inaction into a claim that the work was all done long before the coalition took power. In reality, and on the ground, the new MP should have been dropping into supermarkets and shopping centres in his own electorate and talking to the staff at EB Games, as many of us do. There was great frustration expressed by young people that clear and simple classification was not available in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 or even 2013. The Labor government were so busy spending money that they never turned their minds to the important issue of classification. It is important because parents need to know, when purchasing online material for their children or purchasing games to take home to the living room, precisely what the content is. But, no, for seven years we had no progress apart from meeting after meeting.

It is interesting that the once shameful Labor government for its fiscal responsibility was caught in the act of never having come up with any solution for the gamers in my electorate after 6½ years of government. It was a long time coming. As you can see from the relative elegant simplicity of what is proposed in the Classification (Publications, Films and Computer Games) Amendment (Classification Tools and Other Measures) Bill 2014 today, it was not a terribly hard process to arrive at. With respect, there are not a lot of people running around saying, 'We don't need a better classification system.' There are not a lot of Australians marching in the street saying, 'We don't need a simpler, clearer and less burdensome classification system for games and online material.'

There is almost universal agreement. One of those rare occasions when you can count on state governments because it is not going to cost them a great deal of money, apart from enforcement, to actually sign off on the deal—long before the 6½ years when the now Labor opposition failed to while they were in government. I have already said that if you talk to people in the gaming industry, or if you talk to the customers who walk into those games stores, they want faster, simpler and clearer indications on the front of the packaging they are purchasing.

One of the things that is also important to acknowledge is that there is a significant group of people with great concerns about some of the more highly offensive gaming material that is available overseas and is finding its way to Australia. Whether it finds its way to Australia by illegal means is one situation, but the other is that one could, potentially, accidentally purchase it online or from a store without realising its content. That is why this topic today is so important.

What we do has to be reliable, it has to be trusted by the community and in the end it has to be cost effective. State governments have to be able to enforce it in a reasonable way. So now we have a modernised national classification system, 20 years after it was first developed in 1995, and the most notable thing in this first tranche of reforms is getting rid of ridiculous elements of red tape. I defy you to explain how a federal government in power for six years could possibly sit around and not gain agreement in that time to fix the most basic stuff that we are bringing to this parliament after just six months in office. As has been pointed out here, if minor changes are made to a computer game or to your app, like fixing a bug or adding an image or something like that, that should be able to be done without having to go through a complete reclassification process.

Films that are modified for use on board an aircraft should not require a reclassification. But for six years under this Labor government it was just a problem that was too hard to fix—a mountain simply too high to climb. Lastly, for festivals and cultural organisations, one would have thought that after six years of turning up to Tropfest we would have had a federal Labor government that did not have a tin ear and could actually say, 'I can see how ridiculous this classification space is for you; let's pop down to Canberra, get the state governments together and come up with a solution.' But no, this was far too complex a process to be engaged by this Labor government.

So I am glad that in their final year of power, in the five minutes to midnight before losing a federal election, they came up with the concept of engaging the Australian Law Reform Commission to review that scheme and to look through the content of it. There is some credit in that as the past six years of government flashed before their eyes they finally took some action. But with respect, they deserve to have no credit because they could not bring it to fruition over six long years. People who love gaming are asking for nothing more than a chance to be able to pick up a box with a DVD in it and to see a classification score on. But oh no, that was just a bridge too far for this Labor government. What we need is a state government that can easily enforce a classification. We need a system that can be easily understood by people who are not deeply into gaming. And, lastly, we need confidence amongst retailers that when they put something on the shelf the customer will easily understand it.

In conclusion, this bill amends the classification act in ways that have been called for by my local constituents, by my gaming fraternity in the electorate of Bowman and by parents of minors—whether they have the games in their own homes or whether they travel to other homes to participate—who can know that the classification scheme is intact. They know that we have broadened the existing scope and that we have streamlined a whole range of exemptions. We have made sure that certain content can be classified using simpler tools, such as online checklists, to speed up that process. Of course, all of those classifications are now clearly displayed on the package.

I want to finish where I started. I do not claim that this was the most complex piece of legislation to pull together. But we have had six years of a Labor government that simply did not have the wit to do it. There is still some concern, particularly amongst some religious families in my electorate, that unconscionable video material in gaming material is still for sale. All I can say to those people is that within the law—of what is absolutely objectionable and banned—we simply need to classify clearly so that mature adults can make their own decisions on the gaming that they have at home. I have to be able to provide comfort to families that if their minors do go to another home they will know that there is, at least, a classification available We have to trust adults to make sure that is done in a way where you can have faith with your own family and friends; if there is going to be gaming, then that it is done in a way that considers the age of those who participate.

After that, as a government, I am not able to tell people which classification they should use in the privacy of their own home. That is not what gamers wanted; all they wanted was clear information. For six years I had to look that fraternity and tell them that it was just too difficult for the Labor government. That is why, if you are a gamer out there, today is a very, very happy day. It took a coalition government to bring it to fruition, and I can tell you it is the first tranche of reforms with more to follow. Those I will look forward to and will support as well.

See this speech in context