overview

This profile is under development. It looks at the history of censorship - offline and online - in Australia and New Zealand.

     this profile

The following pages cover -

Australia - a brief history of Australian colonial, federal and state/territory law and practice under development

New Zealand - a complementary account of successive New Zealand regimes, including the the Offensive Publications Act 1892, the video panic of the 1980s, the Mazengarb Report and the Bill of Rights Act 1990

chronology - a timeline of key legislation, reports and events for the two countries from the 1840s to 2001

     orientation

Contrary to the assertions of some enthusiasts, regulation of content on the net is neither uniquely problematical or without precedent. Australian and overseas legislation and industry codes are situated within an economic, cultural and legal context.

One way of understanding internet censorship legislation and issues is to examine the history of content regulation, particularly because Australian and New Zealand regulatory mechanisms build on past practice - they are evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Such an examination highlights the importance of individual action in application of codes and law, since in some periods legislation was tacitly disregarded by bureaucracies and in other periods was directed against figures such as the sadly unappreciated Christina Stead.

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