 Bill
Hastings, the New Zealand censor is about to go before a panel to be
interviewed for his own job. Hastings is seeking a third, three-year term in
the top job at the Office of Film and Literature Classification which he was
appointed to in 1999. It's a role that walks a fine line between what's
injurious to the public good and freedom of expression. Controversy is never
far away - the latest is Hastings' involvement in the R15 classification of
the Aramoana mass murder film Out of the Blue.
Why does he want to continue?
There are still a few things left to do.
That includes seeing through the completion of the New Zealand Censorship
Decisions Database going back to 1916. Almost a century of decisions - bans,
cuts and the reasons given - that need to be preserved. He's keen also to
prepare the office for new media technologies, already coming fast and
furious. Plenty to keep him busy in a job he obviously loves.
The main enjoyment I get is feeling that I've done something. Whenever
you ban some piece of child pornography or depiction of sexual violence,
it's not going to change the world necessarily, but you've done a little bit
to make it better.
He didn't always feel that way. Hastings' first foray into hands-on
censoring - part-time in 1989 at the Video Recordings Authority - was a
disaster. I quit after three weeks. It was horrible. I had heard of 'B
grade' videos, but not C, D, and E grade videos.
But he showed an aptitude for the task. As a practising barrister and
lecturer in international law at Victoria University, Hastings was horrified
there was no overt or systematic reference to legal principles. So he wrote
up a sheet - a checklist of classification criteria that applied the law at
the time. The same principles are applied today - except that the
consideration sheet is now 36 pages.
Hastings also sat on the Indecent Publications Tribunal, joining in 1990.
We met every six weeks and there were bags and bags of crap novels and crap
magazines to read before the hearing. Here he came into contact with the
late Patricia Bartlett, the Catholic pro-censorship campaigner and founder
of the Society for Promotion of Community Standards.
Actually, I had a lot of time for Patricia Bartlett. We [Hastings and
other tribunal members] took tea with her. She had odd ideas, but they were
always consistently odd.
In 1991 the tribunal presided over the landmark Penthouse case which ushered
in a sea change in New Zealand censorship - allowing images of consensual,
non-violent adult sexual activity and banning demeaning depictions. The
single models that weren't having sex, but were just looking out with their
drug-addicted dead eyes into the void - we began to ban those. Depictions of
sex began to become more natural - as natural as these things can be in a
Penthouse magazine.
Bartlett was not impressed. She complained about the foreign influence in
New Zealand censorship, a clear reference to the Canadian-born Hastings, who
came to New Zealand in 1984 after finishing a Masters of Law at the London
School of Economics.
While Hastings wants another chief censor's term, a small, but vocal group
wants him gone. The Society for Promotion of Community Standards says he and
his deputy Nicola McCully have become desensitised to the injurious nature
of hardcore porn and graphic violence. The attack is part of the society's
ongoing campaign against Hastings, particularly citing Hastings gay
lifestyle.
Hastings points out that as chief censor, he's more involved in management
and doesn't do a lot of censoring. That falls to the six men and 10 women in
the office's classification unit.
The restriction on having a censor serve no more than two terms was removed
in 1999 in favour of giving censors job security and keeping institutional
memory.
If anything, Hastings says censors become a bit trigger happy.
We're
always having to find that balance between getting so fed up some days, you
just want to ban everything, with the freedom of expression which is
contained in the Bill of Rights.
All censors also get access to a psychologist and there are weekly
debriefing sessions with colleagues. The key to coping with toxic imagery is
to acknowledge it's there. There are images in my head which I'll never
be able to get rid of which the rest of New Zealand doesn't have to see
because they've been banned. My technique is to see them sealed in little
watertight compartments that don't leak and leach into my mind to affect
everything else that I do.
It also helps to put what's being viewed in perspective - something that
came home during the classification of Out of the Blue. He says the
film wasn't as traumatic as some he's seen, but it was nonetheless moving
and had impact. We talked to people who were families of victims as well
as people who had survived being shot. I was talking to some, for example,
who had their 6-year-old son murdered - this job is nothing compared to
that.
Do the personal attacks by the society affect him? Hastings says he has to
develop a thicker skin. He remembers the hurt of his mother after she read
some vitriolic letters to the editor about him - "Billy, why do they hate
you so much?" Then there was the dread about his kids seeing a newspaper
billboard - "Morals campaigners out to get gay chief censor."
Hastings does get incensed by what the society says - not by the personal
references, but by the half truths and warped logic. That, for example, what
he is doing is part of the homosexual agenda "to have sexually explicit and
degrading films available as widely as possible". Or that there is "a very
strong link between paedophilia and homosexual lifestyle".
Many of the society's attacks go back to the banning of two Living Word
videos by the Review Board in the late 90s. The fundamentalist Christian
videos promoted a thesis about gay men being paedophiles who became parents
and teachers so they could have sex with children to avoid getting Aids. The
ban was eventually overturned by the Appeal Court, which led to some
definition changes in the censorship law and an inquiry into hate-speech
legislation.
Hastings says such videos wouldn't be banned today - mainly because they
represent such a dated view.Looking to the future where the internet
bypasses censorship controls, Hastings sees the office's role as arming
people with the information they need to be their own classification office.
I don't know if this will ever happen, but you can see a rosy sunny day
when we don't need this office any more because everyone will know about, or
not demand, the stuff that harms them."
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