Censor running out of money due to lack of porn
Stuff reports:
The Censor’s Office was about to run out of money within three years. Chief Censor David Shanks said the Crown had not increased its funding over the last 20 years and in that time, with the rise of the internet, material that kept the independent Crown entity buoyant such as pornography, had all but disappeared.
The office was forced to make four redundancies. It also meant that the five staff remaining would take on more work.
While the office’s finances are now out of the red today, the future of its role after 2020 looks murky, Shanks said. …
“In the nineties we had large volumes of adult DVDs coming through, huge volumes and there was quite a steady market in that industry and we were charging our standard fee for classifying these titles and that kept the office quite buoyant and built up reserves.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed by adult DVDs haven’t been a thing for sometime.”
Our classification and censorship system is cumbersome and silly. We have different rules for print, films, TV shows etc etc.
Any future system should have two underlying principles:
- We do not need to classify anything if it has already been classified in say the US, UK, Australia or Canada. Their ratings should automatically apply here.
- We should have a small body across all media that can deal with complaints about an imported classification or consider non classified material.