New Zealand

This page offers a brief history of content regulation in New Zealand.

     themes

Like Australia (although without the complications associated with competing jurisdictions), New Zealand's content regulation regime prior to the 1990s was characterised by incremental development and a concentration on particular media that resulted in the growth of numerous agencies.

Overall, the regulation of print content involved customs regulations from 1858, followed by the Offensive Publications Act 1892 and its successor the Indecent Publications Act 1910. An Indecent Publications Tribunal was established in 1963. Formal film censorship began in 1916 with establishment of the office of the Chief Film Censor. Video recordings were dealt with by the Video Recordings Authority from 1987. Radio and television censorship was dealt with under broadcasting legislation and has effectively been a question of self-censorship (particularly as for most of last century there was no commercial broadcasting).

     print era

Colonial customs agents regulated the import of 'indecent' material from as early as 1858, with decisions being based on local whim and legislation that was in force in England.

The first Act specifically aimed at censorship in New Zealand was passed in 1892. The Offensive Publications Act 1892 banned "any picture or printed or written matter which is of an indecent, immoral, or obscene nature". The restrictions included advertisements with 'sexual' overtones, including images of camiknickers and of course birth control devices. Prior to the 1930s there was a prohibition on any publications "relating to any venereal disease."

The emphasis was on restricting imports of erotica from Europe - later on the restriction of imports of mass-market comics and glossy magazines from the US. The affluent (or merely enthusiastic) could import individual copies from overseas and hope to escape detection by Customs and the Post Office; access through New Zealand retailers wasn't possible.

In 1910 the legislation was superseded by the Indecent Publications Act. The new Act introduced the principle that a publication could be judged as having "literary, scientific, or artistic merit". Its application by government and interpretation by New Zealand's courts was uneven; New Zealand reflected overseas experience in restrictions on (and landmark trials about) the works of DH Lawrence, James Joyce, Marie Stopes and Vladimir Nabokov. The 1910 Act remained in force until 1963.

     film

As in the US and UK, film was seen as both more powerful (a single viewing was likely to deprave and to irreparably weaken the nation's would "moral fibre") and easier to control, since authorities could interdict imports and control public exhibitions. Regulation was assisted by the small size of the local market: most commercial films were imports and much content thus arrived 'pre-censored' in line with the UK and US markets.

The Cinematograph-film Censorship Act 1916 followed agitation about purity and discipline - a traditional moral panic - during the first years of the 1914-18 War and reflected changes in the UK. It established the office of the Censor of Film. In 1920, the Department of Internal Affairs assumed responsibility for the film censorship system. It retained this responsibility until 1994, in contrast to print censorship where some responsibilities moved to an appointed community body in the 1960's.

The Act provided for a classification scheme for those films permitted for exhibition. A system of voluntary classification was introduced in 1920 to assist parents in identifying whether a particular film was suitable for children: an "A" classification indicated an 'adults only' film, with a 'U' for a universal audience. Age restrictions were often not used until the late 1940s. The Department of Internal Affairs notes that during the 1930s the Chief Film Censor William Tanner argued that censorship was "up to parents and should be left as such", since adult content was not understood or of interest to children and the problem therefore did not exist.

In practice the regime was less benign, with restrictions on 'adult themes' such as suicide, drug use, race relations, communism and homosexuality.

     height of the regime

The regime reached its peak with distribution to every household of a copy of the Mazengarb Report on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents, produced by a government inquiry in 1954 and concerned with a supposed wave of "shocking immorality". Mazengarb proposed that all literature that unduly emphasised "sex, horror, crime, cruelty or violence" was to be considered indecent. All publishers and distributors of literature would be registered, with particular scrutiny of publications aimed the young or otherwise impressionable.

Philip Larkin dated the invention of sex - or merely a more liberal regime - to the 1960s. The Indecent Publications Act 1963 created the Indecent Publications Tribunal (IPT), ostensibly to transfer classification standards from the public service to a body that was more representative of community values. The IPT's five members were appointed for a limited term. They were empowered to examine and classify books, magazines, and sound recordings. In practice the transfer had little effect: Penthouse, for example, was banned until 1991.

     1980s ambivalence

The 1980s were characterised by ambivalence, with weakening of traditional restrictions on print (courts, police and customs taking a more relaxed attitude) and a moral panic about videos.

New Zealand's film censorship legislation was aimed at the public exhibition of films, ie cinemas rather than VCRs and DVDs. Agitation about home viewing of recordings, in particular erotica and 'slasher movies' (alleged to have induced murder and other mayhem on the North and South Islands) was reflected in the Video Recordings Act 1987. It established the short-lived Video Recordings Authority, an additional censorship agency responsible for examining and classifying video recordings of a 'restricted nature' (mainly sexually explicit content) supplied for private viewing.

In 1989 a Ministerial Committee of Inquiry into Pornography recommended the establishment of a single government agency to provide a comprehensive classification system in New Zealand. The Committee also recommended that the new agency's powers would extend beyond traditional print and film classification.

The Committee's report resulted in the Films, Videos & Publications Classification Act 1993 (here). The legislation established the Office of Film & Literature Classification (OFLC) on 1 October 1994, replacing the Chief Censor of Films, the Indecent Publications Tribunal and the Video Recordings Authority.

The report was also reflected in the Broadcasting Act 1989 which established the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) as an independent statutory body to determine and maintain acceptable standards of broadcasting on all New Zealand radio and television.

The 1993 Act followed the Bill of Rights Act 1990, which states that everyone "has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form." The Bill is not part of New Zealand's constitution (and therefore is less powerful than its Canadian counterpart).

     reading

A key source for understanding the NZ regime is In the public good? Censorship in New Zealand (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press 98) by Chris Watson & Roy Shuker.

   next page (chronology)