THE Governor-General, Bill Hayden, in a speech to a national conference on violence, pointed to the dilemma. He said his liberal conscience was troubled by television and other media violence. The anti-censorship view of liberals two or three decades ago is now under severe challenge. Then it was easy to scoff at the idiocy of censors who wanted to ban Lady Chatterley’s Lover or The Little Red Schoolbook. Then it was a simple battle between art and censors, or harmless idiocy and the censors. The censors did not seem to have much of a case. It was a question of adults being entitled to read, listen to and watch what they want.
Some believe that society is now bearing the fruit of that liberalisation, that violence and demeaning of women is a direct result of the ready availability of material that expresses explicit violence and sexual exploitation. That material now comes in a greater variety of forms. It is not only written material. It now includes videos material and high-resolution sound on CDs. The correlation between the availability of this material and violence in society is not yet proven. It is obviously a subject worthy of much more research and debate.
Last week (ends June 26) the Australian Customs Service seized two banned death metal CDs in Canberra. The CDs contain lyrics featuring mutilation, cannibalism and necrophilia.
Members of a Canberra death-metal band have said they are being held a a scapegoat for society’s problems and that the lyrics are tongue-in-cheek and only done to create controversy anyway.
The last point is a serious one. It goes to the heart of the censorship debate. It seems that most of these death-metal bands are comprised of rebellious young people and that their lyrics are a form of satirical controversy-stirring. If that is the case, censorship is a very dangerous path. Satire and controversy-stirring, to be effective, inevitably comes in a form that challenges the status quo. It challenges the comfortableness of established society. The voices come, obviously, from outside established society and the accepted norms, otherwise it would not be satire, and in any event would not be effective. It is highly likely that most of the death-metal lyrics are banal trash. Some are no doubt irksome, uncomfortable and distasteful, but they are no grounds for a ban.
If a society, such as Australia, is to treasure free speech it has to accept the freedom to express trash as well as high art. And who knows whether today’s trash might be tomorrow’s high art. The onus has to be upon those who wish to censor to prove their case. Making out a case for censorship must require more than an expression of distaste. It must demonstrate more than just ugliness.
Unless something clearly intends to incite violence or is an abuse of children the case for censorship is weak. Obviously, it is easy to make out a case to prohibit expose of this material to children, but adults in society in general are in just a good position to make up their own minds about whether they want access to material as any group of adults chosen to form a censorship board.
Ultimately, if Australia is to be a better society, less violent and more respecting of the position of women, it will come through the voluntary rejection of this material rather than in some Little Brother or Big Sister determining what will be available and what will be censored.
The hope is that Australians will be able to consign trash to garbage can without the help of censors, and will be able to access freely satire and rebellion in all its guises. No doubt there will be difficult cases. Except in a very limited field of incitement-to-violence cases, it is for the censorship boards to help inform adults about the quality of what they might be about to see, not to deny them the right to see it .