Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to know what information the government was working on when it decided that pornographic material was to be prohibited but not violent material. There have been no public statements regarding violent material, but there is a lot of literature and studies to show that that can be extremely influential on people in non-Indigenous communities. So far as I know, none of the statements by Minister Brough or Prime Minister Howard have canvassed the culture of violence that is abroad at the moment. A lot of it is imported from America. We see on our television sets people being dismembered, tortured—terrible things happening to human beings—in the name of entertainment. I wondered what impact that has on communities and what measurement of that impact the government has and why it has not acted on that. I presume, and the minister can tell me if I am wrong, that there has been an assessment of the impact of pornographic sexually explicit material. I am just wondering why the government has been quiet on violent material but very, very loud indeed on pornographic material.