Nutter senator Barnaby Joyce has tabled a collection of hardcore pornography to illustrate how easy it is to pick it up from petrol stations and corner shops.
Senator Joyce ludicrously said the pornography was encouraging pedophilia.
These have received classification, it pertains to an insinuation that these girls are actually underage,
he said.
NotSoLiberal Senator Julian McGauran said corner stores and service stations were abusing the classification system controlled by the federal government.
McGauran said as he questioned bureaucrats from the Classification
Review Board during senate estimates hearings today: Category one classification is being abused.
Category one allows a softcore publication to be sold over the counter, sealed in an opaque wrapper. Category two allows hardcore
publications to be sold in shops with adult only restrictions.
The classification board's acting director Olya Booyar was grilled for about an hour on what was being done to counteract the publications: The board doesn't go looking for
publications which should be submitted (for classification) .
Enforcement of classifications was a state and territory government responsibility, the hearing was told. Meanwhile adult trade lobbyist, the Eros Association, has backed
coalition senators in urging an overhaul of the national classification regime for pornographic magazines and movies. Eros chief executive Fiona Patten said the system as it now stood wasn't working, with inappropriate material sold through
convenience stores and service stations.
Ms Patten said Eros supported Nationals senate leader Barnaby Joyce's action in raising the issue of magazine classifications during the Senate estimates hearing yesterday.
It's time for the
federal government to overhaul the national classification scheme for publications, she said in a statement.
Ms Patten said all adult magazines and books were supposed to be submitted to the federal government for classification, but less
than 5% of such publications sold in Australia had actually undergone classification. She said classification cost some $500-$700 per publication and for an importer bringing in just 10 copies of a specialist magazine, that would require a cover price of
$70 to cover costs: So, clearly, they cannot comply with the law or they will go broke.
Frequently the same publication was imported by two or three businesses. But because a publication needed to be classified only once, the first to do
so was actually covering the costs of competitors, Ms Patten said.
It's time the government reformed the classification scheme to create a more uniform adult category called non-violent erotica that spans films, publications and computer games
that all fall under the same set of guidelines, she said. Update: 3 Week Shutdown 22nd October 2008 A three-week shutdown should be forced on businesses
that sell wrongly classified hardcore porn, Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce says.
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