Senator Conroy’s decision to create a black list of Refused Classification (RC) websites would mean that 95% of the world’s four million adult sites would need to be listed and blocked, according to the Australian Sex Party.

Party convenor Fiona Patten said that Senator Conroy had failed to understand that the bulk of the world’s adult websites originating in Europe and the US, have much broader parameters in their X rating than the very vanilla X rating that John Howard imposed on the industry in year 2000. “How you can have a filter blocking access to over four million sites with over 420 million pages and not slow the internet down, is beyond belief”, she said. (The live trial involved only 1,000 URLs which in no way tested the system for the extensive amount of material that would have to be blocked).

Ms Patten said that the issue was not about sexually violent websites or child porn. “Every US and European site featuring legal consenting sexual activity has content that would breach the Australian X rating and would be classified as RC. The biggest selling porn movie in the world, Pirates, has been given an RC rating in Australia because it featured an animated dueling scene with two skeletons. It had nothing to do with sex whatsoever. But under the draconian laws around X rated films it was deemed to be ‘violence’ in an otherwise non violent film”, she said. ‘Pirates’ sold over a quarter of a million copies in its first week on sale in 2005 and remains one of the most popular adult film requests on the internet.

Ms Patten said that the Minister was trying to sell the mandatory internet filter against child porn and sexual violence but in fact it would ban mostly depictions of legal sexual acts. ‘Senator Conroy also appears to have ignored the reality that a new classification scheme for classifying websites in Australia will be necessary to cope with the flood of adult website operators who will want to have their sites rated to ensure that they fall below the RC line”, she said. ‘The Classification Board are flat out coping with magazine and DVD submissions to worry about websites”.

She congratulated the Minister on his turnaround on the secondary level filter. His initial proposal was for an opt-out scheme where customers would receive a filtered service unless they asked for it to be removed. “The provision of grants to ISPs to develop an optional filtering mode for households that request it, is a step in the right direction,” she said.

The decision to exempt all Refused Classification (RC) online computer games was also welcomed, she said, but made a mockery of the need to filter other forms of RC media.

Australian guidelines for X

This classification is a special and legally restricted category which contains only sexually explicit material. That is material which contains real depictions of actual sexual intercourse and other sexual activity between consenting adults. No depiction of violence, sexual violence, sexualised violence or coercion is allowed in the category. It does not allow sexually assaultive language. Nor does it allow consensual depictions which purposefully demean anyone involved in that activity for the enjoyment of viewers. Fetishes are not permitted. As the category is restricted to activity between consenting adults, it does not permit any depictions of non-adult persons, including those aged 16 or 17, nor of adult persons who look like they are under 18 years. Nor does it permit persons 18 years of age or over to be portrayed as minors.