forgetting artistic merit

The Australian Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee has released its review of Australia's censorship, sorry media classification regime, Review of the National Classification Scheme: achieving the right balance.

The Committee reports that Australia's censorship, sorry, media classification, regime, is flawed, does not protect Australians, particularly children, from media they might find offensive; that community concerns regarding sexual violence and the portrayal of persons in a demeaning manner are ignored; the film and literature classification system is flawed; that restricted material is sold alongside children's comics; that the internet is causing confusion for censors (sorry classifiers); and proposes uniform legislation to abolish 'Artistic Merit' as a legal defence to charges of possessing child pornography.

Abolishing the legal defence of 'Artistic Merit' is a perfectly predictable outcome to the failed seizure of photographic works by an internationally renowned Australian artist from a Sydney Gallery by New South Wales Police a couple of years ago. The ones the Prime Minister, one Sunday morning outside a Brisbane church, declared were "disgusting".

According to the law, they weren't disgusting enough to be pornography. So naturally the law has to change.

Abolishing 'Artistic Merit' is possibly the only item on their list of grievances that the politicians can easily achieve. There is a raft of State and Federal legislation dealing with media censorship, sorry, classification, that will need attention before anyone comes close to sorting the rest out.

Across Melbourne Park from me the National Gallery of Victoria is having a blockbuster exhibition of paintings, $24 a ticket, including works by Austrian artist Egon Schiele, who did time in a Vienna jail in 1912 for seducing and abducting a young girl, and possessing more than 100 items of pornography. It is unclear which of his paintings seized then by the Viennese Vice Squad are hanging now on the walls of the NGV.

Also, how old is Chloe? In the famous (in Melbourne anyway) oil painting by Jules Lefebvre hanging in Young and Jackson's she looks like, well, she can't be more than how old? They say 19, but as one Senator remarked, you can't trust artists, can you?

Trawling through the list of witnesses to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee I see that if you take out the Christian groups - who did little to protect children the past fifty years and should be barred from all child protection for the next fifty - the remainder were bureaucrats, both from government and industry peak bodies, and politicians. Not one ordinary, fair minded, Chloe loving Australian in sight. This is the same Australian Senate that promised a wide ranging Royal Commission on the abuse of children in care? Isn't it?

If free speech were guaranteed in Australia we wouldn't have to argue over a mess of confusing rules, regulations and laws about censorship, sorry, media classification. We could instead be having a more fruitful and mature debate about the extent of and limits to individual freedom, even what modes of representation are socially constructive or good, and how artists might best contribute to outstanding social outcomes. Maybe that is a little utopian, a bit too much to expect from twenty first century modernity. Or maybe not. I don't know what the answer is, but creating new bureaucracies, making new laws, criminals from artists, and us all a little less free, doesn't seem helpful at all.