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Censorship in New Zealand has changed over the years to reflect the demands for a more liberal application of the law on contentious publications. The Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) is the government agency that is responsible for classification of all films, videos, publications, and some video games in New Zealand. It was created by the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993 and is an independent Crown Entity. The head of the OFLC is called the Chief Censor, maintaining a title that has described the government officer in charge of censorship in New Zealand since 1916. Patricia Bartlett was a New Zealand conservative Catholic pro-censorship activist of the 1970s and 1980s and founded the Society for Promotion of Community Standards (SPCS). This organisation is still actively seeking tighter restrictions on the release of some publications. ==Policy shift: 1986 - present== After Parliament passed the Homosexual Law Reform Act 1986, New Zealand censorship regulatory bodies could not rely on previous case law and tribunal decisions based on the illegality of gay male sex. Accordingly, the Court of Appeal found that censorship regulators should base their decisions on evidence-based social scientific and medical research, in ''Howley v Lawrence Publishing''〔Reported as ''Collector of Customs v Lawrence Publishing Co Ltd'' () 1 NZLR 404〕 later that same year. As a consequence, film, video and publication censorship became increasingly standardised. This led to the passage of the Film Publications and Videos Act 1993, which merged the previously separate Indecent Publications Tribunal, Chief Film Censor and Video Recordings Authority into a single agency, the New Zealand Office of Film and Literature Classification. During the eighties and nineties, an increasingly proactive LGBT New Zealand community fought several test cases that expanded Howley's precedent to encompass all government censorship regulatory bodies. The Society for Promotion of Community Standards lost all of these cases, whether before the Indecent Publications Tribunal, High Court, Court of Appeal or the later Office of Film and Literature Classification. Today, most lesbian and gay erotic media products that contain sexual imagery are labelled R18, available only to those eighteen years of age and over. While fetishist erotic media is similarly regulated, any media that depict paedophilia, necrophilia, zoophilia and drug manufacture information are prohibited in New Zealand. There has also recently been a call to lift tight regulations concerning the reporting of suicide in the country. There have been tight restrictions on the reporting of the topic since the 1950s. The stated reason behind the “need” for this act has long been due to the concern that reporting incidents of suicide could spur the drive for vulnerable individuals to copy the action. There is, however, strong evidence against this, and even stronger evidence that states that by restricting the publication of an issue of legitimate public concern, not only is the government inhibiting free speech, but are hindering the education of the nation on the issue of suicide. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Censorship in New Zealand」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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