Censorship in New Zealand

Early acts The Obscene Publications Act 1857 was one of the earliest censorious acts in New Zealand. Aimed at "works written with the single purpose of corrupting the morals of youth and of nature calculated to shock the common feeling of decency in any well regulated mind", it laid out a process by which obscene works could be destroyed, but did not explicitly define what could be considered an obscene work under law. This was followed by Vagrant Act of 1866 and the Police Offences Act of 1884, which both lightly contributed to censorship legislation. Both of these acts focused on banning the display of obscene media in public, but did not give much precision to the definition of "obscene". The later Offensive Publications Act of 1892 was passed to formalise some of the legal procedure surrounding such cases, but the act contained major loopholes that made it difficult to actually prosecute someone under it. Its aim was in part to shore up some of the weaknesses of the aforementioned 1892 act. Eventually, the book was judged to be indecent on the basis that it "would have a tendency to corrupt or deprave a class of readers not negligible in number", despite its literary merit. The Act was designed to react to the problems of the prior Act and notably it moved the responsibility for classifying books and sound recordings from the courts to a committee of experts. However, the classification of other forms of media, including photographs, remained the jurisdiction of the courts. The Act allowed for the re-submission of books or other media, and in doing so allowed New Zealand censors to adapt to changing times. The decision to overturn the judgement made under the 1910 Act was made in consideration of the new definition of "indecent" in the 1963 Act, under which the literary merit of the work was to be considered in the Tribunal's decision. This judgement ultimately passed with 3 assenting members and 1 dissenting member who viewed the book as perverse and of no exceptional merit. This dissenting voice came from Judge A. P. Blair, the then chair of the Tribunal, who called for the book to be restricted to those over the age of 18. The SPCS took issue with some of the more liberal decisions of the Indecent Publications Tribunal and opposed most sexual content. During the 1980s and 1990s, an increasingly proactive LGBT New Zealand community fought several test cases that expanded Howley's precedent to encompass all government censorship regulatory bodies. The Society for Promotion of Community Standards lost all of these cases, whether before the Indecent Publications Tribunal, High Court, Court of Appeal, or the later Classification Office. Today, most lesbian and gay erotic media that contains sexual imagery is labelled R18, available only to those eighteen years of age and over. While fetishist erotic media is similarly regulated, any media that is considered to promote or support paedophilia, necrophilia, zoophilia, coprophilia, urophilia, or drug manufacture information is prohibited in New Zealand. Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993 The passage of the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993 merged the previously separate Indecent Publications Tribunal, Chief Censor of Films, and the Video Recordings Authority into a single agency, the Classification Office. This agency presides over censorship in New Zealand to this day. In addition to the Office, the Film & Literature Board of Review, made up of 9 experts, was established as the agency that presides over the appeals process for decisions made by the Office. The Board of Review handles appeals made within 28 working days of the original decisions. Any later appeals must be made at least three years from the original decision and are evaluated by the Office itself. Under this Act, films, videos, DVDs, and video games have to go through the Office for classification and labelling, while books, magazines, music, and newspapers are only processed when a complaint it raised about them by a third party. While it was always mandatory for a film to have a physical label displaying its classification, similar rules for print media were not put into place until 2005, where an amendment to the Act required that print media given a restricted classification have a physical label denoting this classification. The Office receives very few classification requests for printed media; only 25 items were classified in 2007. ==Censorship by medium==

Film censorship The advent of film as a commonly consumed form of media brought with it a strong push for legislation that would be able to regulate it. The period between 1909 and 1915 saw requests for film regulation come from many different sources, and these culminated in the Cinematograph-film Censorship Act 1916. This Act remained in place until 1928, when it was replaced by the Cinematograph Films Act 1928. This Act combined the previous act with several amendments, consolidating all of them into one new piece of legislation. Notably, this act included a letter grade system of classification and the extension of the film censors power to encompass advertising material for films. Diplomats from China have twice called upon the Auckland University of Technology to suppress film screenings that were critical of the Chinese government. AUT declined in both cases, although an event commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre was unable to proceed due to a conflict with the Queen's Official Birthday holiday. Theatre Theatre does not appear to be a medium that has been actively censored and there are relatively few instances of attempted theatre censorship in New Zealand. Video games Video games in New Zealand are subject to censorship under the 1993 Act. They are evaluated by the Classification Office under the same criteria as all publications. In addition, some degree of self censorship has been practiced by the NZ video game industry. The extremely graphic nature of the game led the Office to consider it injurious to the public good, and garnered the game a classification of "objectionable". In particular, the Office pointed out that the game rewarded players for particularly brutal killings and forcing the player to kill to progress the story over a non-trivial length of time. In 2023 the Office reconsidered Manhunt and classified it R18. Since Manhunt, several more games have been banned. ==Notable cases==

1900–2000 1922 saw New Zealand experience its first and only attempt to prosecute someone for blasphemy. John Glover was brought to trial in 1922 for the inclusion of the poem "Stand To: Good Friday Morning" by Siegfried Sassoon in a 1921 issue of The Maoriland Worker. This prosecution was brought forth due to the belief that the last three lines of the poem contained blasphemous libel, due to supposedly indecent use of religious imagery. John Glover was found not guilty by the jury, but it was noted in a rider that "similar publications of such literature be discouraged". Section 123 of the Crimes Act was repealed in 2019, making this the only prosecution. In 1930, the film All Quiet on the Western Front was banned in New Zealand as anti-war propaganda. It was eventually allowed to be shown with a few cuts made. The Censorship and Publicity Regulations were passed in 1939 and were used to prevent the dissemination of information deemed contrary to the national interest during World War II. For example, the newspaper of the Communist Party of New Zealand, ''The People's Voice'', was seized in 1940. The Battle of Manners Street in 1943 was a riot involving American and New Zealand servicemen. No report of the event was permitted in local newspapers. During the 1951 waterfront dispute, it was illegal to publish material in support of the watersiders or their allies. The film Ulysses based on the novel by James Joyce was rated R21 Family First New Zealand have called for the banning of violent video games, most notably Grand Theft Auto IV. The film Baise-moi, which contained violence and unsimulated sex by the actors, was the subject of a number of complaints laid by the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards. After an extended classification and appeal process, the film was ultimately classified as R18 by the Court of Appeal in 2003 and restricted to theatrical exhibition or exhibition to students in tertiary media or film studies courses. Under the 1993 Classification Act, all printed material is subject to censorship, including clothing. In 2007 a T-shirt that advertised an album for British extreme metal band Cradle of Filth was banned by Chief Censor Bill Hastings. According to Hastings, it was one of the most graphic T-shirts he had ever seen. The shirt displayed an image of a semi-nude Roman Catholic nun masturbating along with the text "Jesus is a cunt". In 2020 the Office reconsidered the classification of the shirt and re-classified it R18. In 2008 The Peaceful Pill Handbook, a book setting out information on assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia, was banned by the Office. In May 2008 an edited version of the book was allowed for sale if sealed and an indication of the censorship classification was displayed. Its authors Philip Nitschke and Fiona Stewart had removed content that might have directly assisted the suicide of others, which is an offence under New Zealand's Crimes Act 1961. In 2014, the 2010 Queenstown suppressed indecency case gave rise to a discussion over the use of suppression orders protecting celebrities when a member of the New Zealand Parliament, Maggie Barry, described a groping by Australian entertainer Rolf Harris during a studio interview she conducted in her previous broadcasting career. Retired parliamentarian Rodney Hide taunted her in a newspaper column, urging her to use her parliamentary privilege to breach the name suppression order. Following a complaint from Family First New Zealand and the Society for Promotion of Community Standards, the book Into the River was placed under an interim restriction order in 2015 under the Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act 1993, prohibiting it from being sold or supplied until classification for it had been finalised. This decision was met with international criticism and scrutiny. The restriction order was eventually lifted in late 2015 after significant back and forth between the Office and the Board of Review. Into the River was initially given an M rating in 2013, and went through reclassification many times before the interim restriction order was placed and raised in 2015. The book is currently unrestricted. ==Chief Censor==

The Chief Censor is the chief executive officer and chairperson of the Classification Office. Kathryn Paterson was the first Chief Censor under the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993. Bill Hastings was the Chief Censor from 1999 through to 2010 when he stood down to become a District Court Judge and Chair of the Immigration and Protection Tribunal. Deputy Chief Censor Nicola McCully filled the role until Dr Andrew Jack was appointed to the position for a three-year term starting in March 2011. David Shanks was appointed in 2017 and finished in the position in 2022. His successor is Caroline Flora. ==See also==