Chris Watson and Roy Shuker,
In the Public Good? Censorship in New Zealand.
Palmerston North, NZ: Dunmore Press, 1998.
ISBN 0 86469 305 2 (pb)
220pp
NZ$39.95

Uploaded 1 March 2000

Censorship is such a wonderful subject for cultural historians because it is so revealingly symptomatic. Each “moral panic” that coalesces around particular subjects and objects points to more generalized anxieties in the culture at large. In addition, the way in which the specific nature of proscribed subjects change over time provides an excellent historical measure of the nature and extent of a nation’s moral insecurities. Chris Watson and Roy Shuker’s In the Public Good? Censorship in New Zealand demonstrates how the familiar debates surrounding censorship in Western society have been negotiated in New Zealand since the turn of the century. They detail how that society has moved from a position of cohesion and conformity, with its population willingly acquiescing in paternalistic regulation “in the public good,” through the cultural upheavals occasioned by “American” infuences following World War II, to its current status as a society grappling with the question of whether, in the face of supranational delivery systems and data compression, censorship is even practicable, let alone ideologically defensible. Their study offers fascinating insights not just to cultural historians of New Zealand, but to anybody interested in the wider history of censorship and regulation in Western societies. Indeed, the subtle and sometimes peculiar ways in which New Zealand’s censorship history diverges from the more standard histories of the United States, Britain and Australia is particularly illuminating: the differences demonstrate in precise terms the ways in which questions of censorship involve negotiations between broad social trends and specific local conditions.

Watson and Shuker begin by mapping out the discursive framework within which censorship debates typically take place. They outline, for example, the problems surrounding claims that exposure to violent or sexual imagery influences behaviour; the reasons why “pornography” is such a slippery and contested classification; the different implications of consuming cultural productions in public and privates spaces; and so on. They then devote separate chapters to New Zealand’s development of regulatory frameworks for the consumption of film, video, television, radio, some forms of popular literature (transgressive comics, and magazines such as Playboy), video games, and new technologies such as satellite TV and the World Wide Web. The general outlines of these histories will be familiar to many with a knowledge of censorship debates in other national contexts, but some of the peculiarities of the New Zealand situation are intriguing. As a country that receives the majority of its popular culture from the United States, Britain (and Europe generally) and Australia, New Zealand is “at the end of the line” in censorship terms. Most of the material that arrives there has already been heavily regulated for the context of its production and initial circulation; the task of New Zealand’s censors is therefore to identify the differences between its own stance on matters of cultural regulation and that of its cultural suppliers. Moreover, debates surrounding controversial material have usually been well aired in other places before the offending items reach New Zealand’s shores; as a result, the objects themselves stand as symbolic rhetorical rallying points for the opposing sides of broader censorship debates to an even greater extent than is usual in contexts closer to the point of production.

Watson and Shuker’s detailed study also highlights how the fine contours of a nation’s censorship history can be determined by the accidental, the personal, and the unintended. Within the framework of the general trends of the age, the departure of one Chief Censor and the arrival of another can result in a period of unanticipated liberalism or restriction; a riot here or a court case there can activate a latent “moral panic” and result in calls for increased regulation of popular culture and behaviour; and, as they demonstrate most persuasively, simple economic decisions made within the bureaucracy of censorship can have a profound impact on the nature and extent of “publications” made available for public consumption. For example, the authors imply that an increase in New Zealand’s censorship fees may lead to a decrease in non-mainstream material entering the public arena, simply because it is increasingly uneconomical for film festivals and film societies to pay classification fees; the bounds of permissible representation tend to remain untested in such an economic climate. Astonishingly, there also seems to be the risk that much of the country’s film heritage will cease to be available for public consumption, since any material not presented for “labelling” (a kind of classification carrying a fee) by April 1999 faced the prospect of being withdrawn from circulation. As the authors observe, “well-intentioned law-makers and carefully constructed legislation can inadvertently destroy the legitimate enjoyment of many film-watchers while seeking to curtail the excesses of those on the margins.” (203)

Beyond its concern about such bureaucratic heavyhandedness, this book carries an overt didactic message: namely, that in the absence of the benign paternalistic influences of the past, populations must equip themselves to manage and digest media information, and to clarify and defend their national and cultural identites, specifically through media education in schools. Hooray to that, but the forces of multinational capitalism aligned behind the new technologies of satellite TV, cable and the Web allow the routine circumvention of regionally-based regulatory conventions. Sadly, they make the rearguard local educational action Shuker and Watson advocate seem increasingly forlorn.

Ruth Vasey