Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Classification (Publications, Films and Computer Games) Amendment Bill 2006 amends three pieces of legislation—the Classification (Publications, Films and Computer Games) Act 1995, the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 and the Freedom of Information Act 1982. The bill integrates the Office of Film and Literature Classification into the Attorney-General’s Department and, in so doing, amends its functions to cover multimedia technological developments.

There is a clear argument for updating the law in order to properly classify multimedia content, such as the extra features that are now frequently included in the DVD release of movies and television programs. Things like out-takes, games, advertisements, behind-the-scenes specials and additional material left out of the original movie or television program for good reason also ought to be properly classified. The updated guidance offers better protection for families by providing comprehensive advice to parents on content. Labor supports this.

The integration of the Office of Film and Literature Classification into the Attorney-General’s Department provides greater control of its functions to the Attorney-General. The bill transfers from the board director to the Attorney-General the power to determine markings for each type of classification and the manner in which they are to be displayed. I ought to make the general point when we are having this kind of discussion that, however much we might deplore some of the content which shows up in the modern era, publications, computer games and video material evermore accessible via the internet cannot be hidden. The ideas they contain cannot be hidden and the only ultimately effective way to overcome offensive or destructive ideas is to present and espouse virtuous ideas, and this is what past censorship efforts have taught us. Former US President John F Kennedy said about America:

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

I think he was pretty close to the mark.

The explanatory memorandum tells us that the classification publications legislation amends three acts and that it has four schedules. Schedule 1 facilitates the integration of the Office of Film and Literature Classification into the Attorney-General’s Department; removes the director’s financial powers and responsibilities for the administration of the Office of Film and Literature Classification; replaces references to that agency in legislation with more appropriate references; and provides for Australian Public Service staff from the Attorney-General’s Department to support the Classification Board and the Classification Review Board in executing their statutory functions. So, rather than having the director appointing consultants, attorneys-general will be providing APS staff and the financial accounts will be kept by the Attorney-General’s Department, which will be assuming responsibility for the financial administration.

Schedule 2 makes amendments to reinforce the independence of the Classification Board and the Classification Review Board. It provides separate statutory powers to the convener of the review board to manage the administrative functions of the review board independently of the board. It confines the existing powers of the director to matters associated with the board and gives new powers to the convener for matters associated with the review board. These include obtaining copies of material to be reviewed, considering applications for the waiver of fees and issuing classification certificates. Consistent with ministerial responsibility, the bill also transfers to the minister administering the act, the Attorney-General, the power to determine fee waiver principles in consultation with state and territory censorship ministers. As part of that schedule, we will remove the anomaly whereby the Classification Review Board is now reliant on the Director of the Classification Board for some of its administrative functions. This schedule also remedies some technical errors.

Schedule 3 makes amendments to improve the operation of the national classification scheme and respond to a very rapidly changing technological environment for entertainment media. It provides that additions to already classified films of descriptions or translation, such as subtitling, captioning or navigation functions such as interactive menus, are not considered modifications necessitating reclassification.

The bill also sets up an additional content assessor scheme which will recommend to the board the classification and consumer advice for additional content which is released with an already classified or exempt film. Quality assurance processes are included in the scheme to ensure the ongoing integrity of the classification process. Of course, it is the case that we are getting these additions to already classified films in a changing technological environment, so the government takes the view—I think not unreasonably—that things like navigation functions should not be considered modifications which require reclassification and, where we have additional content being released with an already classified film, we will have this assessor scheme for the additional content. I think that is a reasonable modifying measure and there are safeguards which have been put in place to protect the integrity of the classification scheme as a whole.

The final schedule, schedule 4, makes a number of miscellaneous minor amendments to repeal expired or redundant provisions. The bill also transfers from the director of the board to the minister the power to determine markings to be displayed about classified material. That power is to be exercised by the minister in consultation with state and territory ministers. The bill will not have any financial impact, or it is not expected there will be any significant financial impact. It will not result in any change to the net asset position for the Commonwealth. It relates pretty much exclusively to changes to administrative processes. So the opposition does not regard this as a controversial piece of legislation and will not be opposing it.

Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am glad to speak to the Classification (Publications, Films and Computer Games) Amendment Bill 2006. Even though it is non-controversial, it deals with a major area of future concern. I have no difficulty whatsoever with it. As the shadow minister has indicated, Labor does not have difficulty with the change of the classification function in this instance, covered by this bill, from the board to the Attorney-General’s office. In schedules 1, 2 and 4 there are a series of what I would see as relatively minor amendments, but I note in passing that in schedule 2 there is a reinforcement of the independence of the Classification Board and the Classification Review Board. What they are intending to do in schedule 1 is to try to get a better integration of the Office of Film and Literature Classification into the Attorney-General’s Department.

In schedules 1 and 2 it is a question of better defining who controls this mechanism. The decision has been taken to bring that into the Attorney-General’s office. I have no problem with that whatsoever. I think it is a sensible thing that schedule 2 underlines the independence of the Classification Board and the Classification Review Board.

What interests me in particular is the whole question of schedule 3 because it involves a series of changes in consultation with the industry. They are changes to attempt to get flexibility and certainty in the area of new media and in the way in which material is classified, in order to be able to pin down whether or not something is a new work and to pin down the definition of a film. The reason for the change is that we have seen already such dramatic changes in the way in which content is distributed Australia-wide and worldwide, and this bill attempts to deal with distribution on DVD.

In the old days, as you would remember, Mr Deputy Speaker—as I and others in the chamber would—we just did not have the problems that we are faced with currently. For example, we have recently had produced up to 18 minutes of our first real feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang. In the old days, there were not many places to show it. There was the local cinema, as the cinema complexes were built through the 1910s and then in the 1920s and 1930s, and the outback country shows, which were often held on a Sunday night in open-air tents. In those contexts, it was relatively easy to control not just the classification of the material but also the distribution of it. It was pretty simple and straightforward. The drama in those days was the content of a film and whether or not it was deemed to be appropriate in terms of distribution to a wide audience.

Those questions are still with us. They are still with us in this bill and they are still with us in terms of classification. But there is a particular set of problems that this bill tries to grapple with; that is, there is more than one method of distribution. Even after a work has been through classification—and these schedules tie it down quite nicely—it does not have just one element of distribution. It will be played at the flicks, where it will get a relatively short period of time, unless it is a big blockbuster. Then there will be a later distribution—some years later, in some cases—which will be fairly narrow, through the broadcast medium on TV. There will be a bit of retro if the film has some impact. There are also now two other areas because we now have very quick distribution through DVD. The reason for that is not just piracy and the fact that stuff can be knocked off very quickly. The industry itself, after taking a very long look at this, said, ‘What we have to do is not only release, where we will get a certain amount of money out of it, but also follow that almost conjointly—in a lot of cases it is conjointly—with DVD distribution.’ There are two different markets here.

This creates two different problems. If you take a film or a work and go through all the business of classifying it, all the drama of deciding whether it is too violent or whether there are problems with classification because of sex and so on, and you get that work all bottled up and put down on a DVD, what happens when they put extra bits into it? That is fundamentally what schedule 3 is about, because the extra bits can be extraordinarily different or they can be pretty similar. Now, what are you going to do with it? Just because you put it onto a new medium, is it a new work? Is it a new film? The answer to that is, of course, no. This is quite ostensibly established here. If you wanted to be pedantic you could say, ‘Oh but it’s a new medium.’ People used to think of that in that way: it is a new medium therefore it is something different. To me, the medium that you use to distribute it is relatively unimportant. It is the content itself that they are attempting to pin down here.

Why is there a particular problem? Now, instead of one form of a work or a film or however you want to depict it, there are multiple forms. We now have director’s cuts, extended versions and so on. The Good Shepherdwhich I picked as part of my research today in reading this morning’s papers—is only the second film that has been produced by one of the world’s great actors, who acted in eight of Martin Scorsese’s very violent films. That is Robert De Niro, who has made two films. This film one is about the CIA between 1939 and 1961, and it is about the human impact of people being involved in things. In terms of classification, there would be no problem in terms of violence or difficulty for this particular film, because most of that has been cut out in the released version at the cinemas. But in the extended version there are a series of violent scenes which the Classification Board would have to come to terms with and make a determination about. So you have a difference between what is put out in the cinemas and what is put out on DVDs in these extended versions.

Instead of it being seen as a new work, schedule 3 properly sees it as part of the original film or the original work, as it is not going to be completely done over again. But they have to look at those elements and ask, ‘Given that this is a material part of the work, does it still fall within those classifications?’

What is more important—and this is one of the difficulties in dealing with the minutiae of all this—is that they can load just about anything you can imagine into an extended DVD presentation. It is not just the original work itself; it is all the offshoot stuff. I say in passing that the most boring stuff you could probably ever come across, having watched a film, is to then go back and watch the film again with the director, and his sidekick quite often, commenting on what the film is about. One could ask: ‘Didn’t you get it the first time? Weren’t they good enough in terms of telling you what the film was about?’ I do not mind them having a series of shorts where they explain what they think the film is about, but to do a complete rerun is just a waste of space in this area.

There are other particular things dealt with in the bill that are extremely important, not just in terms of the classification question but also in terms of just what Australian industry’s role is in this regard, and how it should be properly dealt with. I commend the people who have put this work together and the Attorney on the work done here in terms of how you deal with these different elements, because it is important. There are distinctions between what the film or the work is and what is additional content—what is germane to that—and there is even the question of having a fictional town and adding stuff in relation to that. But what is not defined—and it is important that it is clearly defined, if we look at section 93—what is not additional content, what has to be looked at separately are television programs, as there could be spin-offs from those, and computer games that are produced to be played independently.

This a crucial area because one of the significant problems in the classification area is that you could have a film produced that can pass all of the tests and classifications, and that is fine, but the level of violence in computer games is extraordinary. This is an extremely significant industry for Australia because we are substantial players within it, but one of its critical problems is the level of violence. The whole question of the impact of that on young people in particular who are playing those games in an absorbed manner is fundamental.

People could take the easy way out and say: ‘Well, here’s a film and here’s all the stuff that is additional content; it is just associated with it. The computer games are just part of that whole generic bit.’ That would be the easy way out but it is the wrong way out. I commend the Attorney on the approach that is taken here because they need their own independent classification.

The gaming area which makes games that are associated with film content is not only extraordinarily expensive but also extraordinarily profitable. It is bigger, in terms of what Australia produces, the money that comes back into Australia and its importance, than our film industry. This was not the case some years ago, but it was becoming the case when I was deputy chair of our communications committee and we looked into the current and future problems involved in making games for Australia and the world, and at how we could best assist in that regard. There were two fundamental problems. One was the level of violence and the other was the fact that the necessary support for this industry simply was not great enough. But you need to understand just how significant it is and just how dynamic this area is.

The last area I want to speak about is something that the bill does not fully deal with but which it predicts. Again, this is a sensible approach to take. You really do need to be flexible in this area. As is often the case with whatever area you are looking at, people take what exists at a particular point in time and project it into the future. You cannot do that in multimedia, you cannot do it in IT, and you cannot do it in terms of distribution of content in a digital form. The fundamental thing that we are going to have to grapple with will be how we are affected by the fact that this is now such a worldwide issue.

The rise of Apple as a distributor of content through iTunes and its dominance in the music area is well known and understood. What is not as readily appreciated is that Apple has generated an immense revolution in the downloading of video content. It has done that with some material that it has locked up in agreements. On 10 January at the Moscone Centre in California, Apple made its biggest announcement for the year. It has partnered with Yahoo and Google. It has done other significant things in this area, including with Paramount Pictures and its movies. Apple is providing television shows directly for download at relatively low cost.

The impact in this area will be extremely significant. If your classification systems are fine, that is okay. However, alongside that is the whole phenomenon of YouTube—which has recently been bought—distributing material on the internet. Despite the New South Wales Leader of the Opposition thinking he is the first one to use YouTube to do things, Kevin Rudd and other people have already used it. This is a mechanism whereby people can put very short films onto the net, but already there have been significant problems with inappropriate material appearing. An international organisation runs it, and so it is beyond our direct reach. This will provide for the Attorney, the government and future governments a significant problem because they will need to go beyond our jurisdiction to an international set of arrangements, agreements or understandings to get our enforcement in the classification area extended to that area. The damage that can be done by uncontrolled direct download is significant in terms of not only piracy but all of the elements that are properly part of the Classification Board and the Classification Review Board.

In closing, I commend the Attorney and the department for the very efficient work that has been done in relation to this bill. I have no qualms whatsoever about the integration of the Office of Film and Literature Classification into his department. I am particularly pleased that on foot is an appreciation of not only the dynamic nature of modern multimedia and that the whole game has changed but also the need to make flexible, sound and sensible responses in the future to what is a very dynamic area.

Philip Ruddock (Berowra, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

in reply—I thank the member for Wills, who spoke before, and the member for Blaxland. I particularly commend the member for Blaxland for his very thoughtful speech. I was listening very closely to it and I was very conscious, as I will demonstrate when I respond, of the points that he was making. The Classification (Publications, Films and Computer Games) Amendment Bill 2006 has two important purposes: to implement the administrative arrangements consistent with our accountability framework and to make changes to classification practices to recognise the changes in technology.

I will speak briefly about the administrative changes. These changes simply ensure that the Classification Board and the Classification Review Board remain the bodies that determine classification issues. They are absolutely independent, and their functions will remain unchanged. But the role of receiving advice and implementing decisions are not matters that ought to be in the hands of an independent agency, otherwise you would only need to replicate that within a department to ensure that you were appropriately supported. I came to a view, particularly after the Commonwealth had reviewed the issues of functions of boards and their primary responsibilities in a broader context, that we should make the transfer of the support function and put the federal minister or the national minister in the same position that, I might say, all of the other partner ministers are in where they receive advice from their department on issues relating to the administration of the classification scheme. The bill does transfer the power to make legislative instruments from the board to the minister. That is consistent with the sorts of arrangements about which I am speaking, but given the cooperative nature of the scheme, these powers will be exercised in consultation with state and territory ministers.

We are responsive to the needs of industry in the changing technological environment. The bill contains amendments to respond to those changes, particularly in the context of the widespread use of DVDs and even higher capacity disks coming onto the market. These were not envisaged when the bill or the act was originally drafted. The act contains safeguards to prevent modifications to films after classification. These remain, but industry often add descriptors or translations—they subtitle, they caption, they dub. There are a whole lot of audio descriptions and navigation functions, there are interactive menus and currently this means that films must be resubmitted. Descriptions, translations and menu functions to facilitate navigation generally do not provide new content as such. Requiring new classification is very disruptive.

The bill provides for an additional content assessment scheme based upon the current approach to classification of games. The scheme will facilitate the practice of value-adding when it is an already classified film, by including new material such as interviews, bloopers and the making of features.

The member for Blaxland spoke very eruditely about these matters from his expertise and knowledge of film. I must say I do not have that same experience. I do not know whether that is good or bad for a minister who is dealing with classification issues. Perhaps it means I have no conflicts of interest from the basis of views that I form, but I did see one DVD at home. I think it was on the day that shook the world, which was in relation to the Cuban missile crisis. I can see that members have actually seen this so I will have to be careful what I say. I did see the director’s cuts in relation to an F111 flying scene, viewing the deployment of these missiles. You saw the various overflights and they took you through the reasons why particular shots did not give you the appropriate insight and why the one that was used was more appropriate. I thought it was useful, interesting information. It was not likely to lead to any different classification. Yet you need to be able to deal with those matters in a sensible way. Obviously if people are using that to introduce material that would not be permitted of classification generally and would have to be restricted, there is a basis upon which that can be oversighted, but where it is not going to lead to significant changes, one should not have to go through the whole classification task again. Those measures seemed eminently sensible to me and the bill achieves that purpose.

The bill also contains several other minor amendments relating to technology and I welcome the support that has been foreshadowed by the shadow attorney and the member for Blaxland. I might say in relation to the member for Blaxland’s final comments that we are very conscious of these issues relating to the internet. I thought you raised them very sensitively and well. There is a review being undertaken that involves me and the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts as to how we can deal with these issues. They are complex and while it might be nice to have a harmonised system of classification for the world, I think we are a long way off that. It may well be of course that community standards in different societies differ in any event. It would be very difficult to put together that sort of arrangement. The extent to which people can transmit information that is downloaded here, which would normally require classification but avoids that, is something that we are very conscious of. That review is still being pursued. I thank honourable members for their support for the bill and I look forward to a speedy passage in another place.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Ordered that the bill be reported to the House without amendment.