The child porns raid and arrests across the country has caused a flurry of action and anxiety at the Office of Film and Literature Classification, as Hugo Kelly has told Crikey subscribers in recent days.


Fear & Loathing in the censorship bunker

From the October 14 sealed section

By Hugo Kelly


Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty signalled today that the child porn crackdown is far from over: More child porn out there, says Keelty

Keelty said he had started talks with the Office of Film and Literature Classification to help speed up the process of classifying the millions of images, publications and videos seized.

“We need to have a new way of dealing with it and a more expeditious way of dealing with it, otherwise we are going to be bogged down in a lot of the court cases that will come out of all of this,” Keelty said today.

Who is the head of the Classification office and board? Why, Crikey’s old friend and Liberal apparatchik Des Clark. Des’s great achievement has been to bolster the top levels of management in the office – while depleting the board of strength and resources.

This brilliant strategy is about to be tested as a significant amount of child pornography lands on the board and office.

Although the Act allows for twenty board members, under Des the board has dwindled to less than ten members, with only four (and a half) engaged in day-to-day classifying. The other four deal with loftier matters, such as “strategic planning” and administrative tasks.

The classifying board members have now been informed OH&S policies are out the window and they are to work long hours, six days a week, for months, until the work is done – with no overtime or time in lieu.

This material is the most difficult to view, and demands the most attentiveness considering that getting the classification wrong can send an innocent individual to jail, or allow a paedophile to be released freely into the community.

The board members in question are very aware that such a plan could lead to emotional collapse and damage for themselves, and possible miscarriages of justice for those accused: six of whom have committed suicide thus far.

What rabbit will Mr Clark manage to pull from his hat this time round? First, of course, he has to return from his extensive taxpayer funded European tour and holiday.

The child porn puzzle

From the October 15 sealed section:

Crikey’s man in the press gallery, Hugo Kelly, yesterday wrote that the rudderless Office of Film and Literature Classification is facing a harrowing task reviewing the material seized by federal police. Today, he briefly poses a broader dilemma:

Your correspondent has a liking for risque fiction. To dull the weekend election pain, I re-read Evelyn Waugh’s ludicrously funny ‘Vile Bodies’, which subscribers will remember begins with a customs officer confiscating a writer’s manuscript on the flimsiest of premises.

We’ve moved some way from the era of the six o’clock swill when the cultural tone was set by the Women’s Christian Temprance Union and the DLP; when police and customs’ agents were free to decide with abandon what could and could not be read by the good citizens of Australia.

But with the advent of the internet, so much information is available to everyone that policing borders is daunting. This latest contretemps is throwing into a harsh light many of the weaknesses of the old systems in dealing with the new.

For an insight into the dilemma facing the federal police, the gossip from the Office of Film and Literature Classification is that if they put just one person on to classify the material that was confiscated in the first week of police raids, such is the volume it would take them 84 years.

A dilemma indeed. Solutions, please to hugo @crikey.com.au