One of the main problems we have with censorship issues in Australia is that the censors are too old. The average age of Australia’s Classification Board (CB) is about 40 years old. The average age of the Classification Review Board (CRB) is even higher. The average age of the majority of DVD watchers is about 25 plus.

Successive governments in Australia have never given people between the ages of 18 and 30 a fair go. There is only one person in their twenties on both censorship bodies. John Howard hand-picked the last CRB under his watch. Most of them were grandparents! He even had the hide to pick a former 60 year old conservative Attorney General. Like that bloke really needed the job and like he really understood what a 20 year old living in Fitzroy or Darlinghurst wanted from a censorship scheme…

If the bulk of entertainment media users are in their 20s and 30s then the makeup of official censorship bodies should reflect that. Were not living in China or Iran. And not some dweeb fresh out of the Catholic University who goes to youth fellowship every second night either. No. There should be a 20 year old, gamer with a couple of tatts and a ring through her nose sitting up there with all the suits and representing the millions of young men and women like her in Australia. In a democracy, surely that’s what its all about. But of course Rudd and Turnbull couldn’t care less about the community standards of 20 and 30 year olds because they are vastly different from theirs. Rudd and his new censorship minister, Brendan O’Connor, have no interest in creating R and X rated categories for computer games and neither have they any interest in taking on the states to standardise their outdated laws on X rated films. The only thing that is stopping Rudd from creating adult categories for computer games is a small change to the way that the State and Commonwealth Censorship Ministers agree to conduct their business. At the moment the stuffy old Christian Attorney General from South Australia says he thinks R and X rated computer games are bad for the community and so the rules say he can veto all the other State Attorneys General who have already said they’ll allow an R category. If they were real Attorney Generals they’d take this son of a bitch out the back of the toilet block and tell him to mind his own business! But no…they’re too polite and overawed by ‘protocol’ to consider rocking the boat for what the majority of Australians want here. In fact Rudd should be the bovver boy and just change the damn rules for their silly meeting game and say the ‘majority rules’. Surely he knows there’s one idiot in every team and to reduce the team to that level is madness.

And where’s the grand poohbah federal Attorney General, Robert McClelland, in all this? Oh, that’s right. Censorship is so below his station in politics that they have to give all this distasteful tits and bums stuff away to a junior minister who is not even in Cabinet. Mr McClelland only deals in big picture issues like national security, you know.

Extremely discriminatory and ageist attitudes underly current censorship policy and young people need to vote hard against this sort of bullshit before it goes any further.