Censorship one goosestep too far

Trigger warning! The assault on culture continues. The latest proposal is for a 10-year rolling review to upgrade censorship of movies, books and television shows to bring them into line with “modern community attitudes”.

This is something that could have come straight from the pages of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Under the proposal put forward by Australia’s Classification Board, ministerial oversight would be removed and a bureaucracy unto itself would be freed to have its censorious way with the words and images that have made us what we are today.

The cultural morality police already have called foul and deleted or overwritten classics ranging from Mary Poppins and Roald Dahl to comedy series Fawlty Towers and silver-screen epic Gone With the Wind. Today’s readers of Poppins, we are told, would be shocked to see a chimney sweep referred to as a Hottentot. Dahl has been in trouble for his use of racial and sexual stereotypes. Censors missed the comedy in John Cleese’s parody of Nazi Germany, with the Fawlty Towers “Don’t mention the war” episode ruled one goosestep too far.

The Classification Board has told the Albanese government’s censorship review that “if classification is to be undertaken to give effect to community standards of morality, decency and propriety … there needs to be a legislative acknowledgment that those standards change over time”. This is a backward-looking perspective designed to entrench wowserism and make our culture less dynamic.