Australian Attorneys General Still Feel The Need To Think About The 37-Year-Old 'Children'
from the GTA-is-nothing-but-a-'midlife-crisis-simulator' dept
Australia has a long history of video game censorship, mainly due to the fact that its rating system stops at age 15. This has resulted in a great many games being censored by the manufacturers in order to reach the Australian market and, in some cases, has prevented the sale of offending titles entirely.Despite the fact that the average gamer is now 37 years old, Australia is still refusing to treat gamers like adults. There has been a lot of talk (some of it dating back to last year) among various politicians about the subject of a new R18+ rating that would bring them in line with much of the rest of the world, but just when it seemed the various parties might reach a consensus, certain holdouts decided to "not vote";:
While the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General had planned on making a decision regarding the introduction of an R18+ rating for video games on Friday at a meeting in Adelaide, the NSW Attorney-General has announced he will not vote on the topic at this time.Well, if these three attorneys general have some concern about the "proper" level of censorship, they must be acting in their constituent's best interests, right?
In order to change the classification, all nine federal, state and territory censorship ministers must agree - even if all eight remaining vote for the change, one person holding back means the whole deal is postponed until at least the next SCAG meeting.
According to recent studies, two-thirds of the Australian states and territories are publicly in favour of the R18+ introduction (including the controversial South Australian vote) - while the remaining three (NSW, Victoria and Western Australia) announced they would hold off on making a decision until some time closer to the meeting.So, it comes down to this: certain members of Australia's governing body still firmly believe that gamers are children, and, despite public sentiment otherwise, are now deploying stalling tactics in order to hold off any movement toward treating their game-buying citizens as adults until 2012 at least.
In a recent statement issued to GameSpot AU, a spokesperson for Smith explained:At the earliest, Australian gamers will have to wait until they turn 38 in order to have a chance to buy unaltered videogames approved for those ages 18 and above. Of course, what else can be expected from a governing body that included an attorney general who felt that gamers are more dangerous than biker gangs?
"We're not going down a definitive route. More work needs to be done on this issue. We want to wait to see the results of the ALRC [Australian Law Reform Commission] classification review."
The ALRC review is currently underway, but no results are expected until early 2012 at the earliest. The review addresses video games, but also other classification-related issues, with an overhaul of the Australian national classification scheme predicted as a result.
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Filed Under: australia, censorship, video games
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"Australia is still refusing to treat gamers like adults"
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Sounds like the Aussie AG's have serious brain damage
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You know, those people who don't care one way or the other.
http://gamepolitics.com/2010/10/20/au-minister-we-need-more-public-feedback-r18
What is really stupid is requiring unanimous rule to do anything. Any country that requires that a group of individuals meet and reach an unanimous consensus is a messed up country.
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Re:
given the amount of stupid things that get passed because one party agreed to support another party's stupid thing to get their stupid thing passed, when the Idea is that if it's stupid they Won't...
then again, technically it needs a unanimous vote of... one (the governor general)... to become law (on top of getting through parliament itself.). problem is that our GGs tend to assume that if it got through parliament in the first place it's fine, completely ignoring all the political horse-trading (and thus their job.)
nevermind the would-be-PM's basically selling the ministerial positions for support for their own harebrained plans. (the GG is supposed to be limited to selecting only from parliament to prevent them just picking their buddies, but a 'tradition' has developed of choosing whatever party leader can get a majority backing from parliament behind their party and then appointing whoever that person wants to all the other jobs, leading to even Worse croneyism...
and there's that pet rant again. oops.
though i can certainly understand the objection to one person being pointlessly obstructionist, i can also see the point in requiring unanimity to change things.
(seriously, our government here seems to delight in changing things that aren't broken, often breaking them in the process, purely to justify their pay-cheques. needing unanimity would prevent that. it's amazing how much less Stupid our government gets when something big happens they have to deal with rather than their random pet projects... though this current one seems to prefer to use the big things to ram through their pet projects instead, in what really should be seen as a massive abuse of power.)
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Only ever been this way......
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Re: Only ever been this way......
Hmmm... I'm not so sure it's fun so much as a simple misunderstanding and/or easy scapegoat.
The real issues that cause social problems have never changed - unemployment, crime, poverty, prejudice and so on. These are hard, complex issues to tackle that no politician can ever claim to have completely fixed nor run simple campaigns on to get elected. They need easy issues that they can claim easy solutions to.
Meanwhile, each generation views the pastimes of the later generations with suspicion. They don't get their music, their ideas, their culture and so anything new can be blame for society's ills. The reason why we don't hear anti-rock or anti-TV or anti-home video rants any more is that they have now been around for a long time and today's politicians (and older voters) understand them. Come out and say "that rock music is killing our children", and most voters will think you're a fool. Say the same about video games, and those voters with no direct experience of them or who don't understand them will swallow that lie.
So it will continue with whatever the next generation is into. But, by then, video games will be as much part of the accepted culture as rock music and comic books are now, and the cycle continues...
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So Australians, don't be stupid and vote for Labor. Don't vote for right-wing parties.
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and even then that assumes that the current status quo is relatively good and their right wing leanings not too radical in an absolute sense. (it's possible to seem radically right wing in an extremely left wing environment without actually being problematically so.)
best bet seems, generally speaking, to be mildly progressive, economically slightly left of center, and just barely authoritarian enough to allow the government to actually function usefully (the ends of that scale are 'anarachy' and 'controls Everything')
I'd also make the case that any party that has consistently been in parliament/it's equivalent and even Intermittently been able to form a government either on it's own or as the head of a coalition, is highly suspect after it's first couple of terms.
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New dumping colony?
Careful, Australia... you're cutting in on our turf.
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Re: New dumping colony?
there's massively less people actually having to be that dumb to get the same effect.
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A change of tactics
For instance Rugby/League in Australia actually physically harms children.
"One children’s hospital in Australia reported 125 rugby-related cervical spine injuries to children under 15 years of age over a 3-year period" (Browne, 2006)
Would this highlight their hypocrisy?
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Re: A change of tactics
I'm confused. What does a wholesome sport like rugby have to do with learning to deal drugs, shoot people and rape women?
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Re: Re: Re: A change of tactics
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Old gamers are Young
Getting old is compulsory.
Growing up is optional.
My body is 40 years older than I am :D
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Re: Old gamers are Young
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Re: Old gamers are Young
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When any government
When any government has censorship ministers, they are doing it wrong.
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They dont make law's on statistics, they make it on morals.
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Left Wing Right Wing
Left and Right. Does that mean for heros we have to choose between Hitler and Stalin?
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In the mean time...
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Re: In the mean time...
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Oh well
Excellent job those ppl are doing (where's my sarcmark?)
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