CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA — The Eros Association, the trade group for the Australian adult entertainment industry, has joined a group of senators in calling for the country’s pornography laws to be revamped.Although Eros believes the way the laws are enforced now puts too great an emphasis on adult stores and not enough on convenience and grocery stores and service stations, the association stops short of making the sorts of demands one conservative senator has made.
Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce wants any store caught selling wrongly classified hardcore materials to be shut down for three weeks on the first offense and lose its business license for three years on the third.
Eros chief Fiona Patten said she doesn’t believe that severe a punishment is warranted, although the national Classification Board that is responsible for approving adult materials does need to clamp down on the community liaisons that are responsible for policing the shops that sell it. In addition, the classification system needs to be overhauled to ensure all adult materials and sellers are treated equally.
“It’s time for the federal government to overhaul the national classification scheme for publications to create a powerful uniform adult category called Non Violent Erotica (NVE) that spans film, publications and computer games, that all fall under the same set of guidelines,” she said in a statement. “The public have no idea about the differences between an R- or X-rated film, A Category 1 or 2 Restricted magazine and an MA rated online or computer game.”
According to Patten, less than 5 percent of adult publications currently sold in Australia are classified, and in many cases importers of adult magazines simply could not afford the classification charges.
Unlike most other countries, in Australia it is compulsory for all adult magazines and books to be submitted to the federal government for classification.
“The cost to classify a publication ranges from $500 to $700,” Patten said. “This even includes the classification of a business card that might have a nude dancer on it. Many adult publications are imported in small numbers. If an importer wants to bring in 10 copies of a specialist magazine, they have to load the cover price of that magazine by up to $70 just to recover the classification costs, so clearly they cannot comply with the law or they will go broke.”
Frequently, two or three businesses will import the same publication and whoever classifies it first pays the fee. That gives subsequent importers a competitive advantage, Patten said, and also causes many importers to neglect to classify the material they bring into the country.
Under Eros’ proposed NVE system, NVE magazines (Category 2) and films (X-rated) would be available only to adults in adult shops. That would prevent unclassified hardcore adult materials from ending up in public retail outlets as it currently does. Patten said Eros has been alerting state and federal governments to the problem for years, but the Classification Board’s community liaison scheme was too obsessed with policing the sale of X-rated films in adult shops to worry about the more important issue of adult material in family areas.
Patten also said censorship laws need to be consistent throughout Australia. In West Australia, Category 2 explicit magazines are sold by minors working in book shops, while in Queensland R-rated films are legal but the equivalent magazines are illegal.
Joyce, however, believes penalties need to be introduced into the law regardless.
“Once it becomes evident the repercussions of having this on your shelf, the problem will very quickly resolve itself,” he told a Senate hearing.
