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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 29, No. 4. 1966.

Tribunal book is not good

Tribunal book is not good

The Indecent Publications Act is now in its second year of operation.

How successful has it been? Certainly the most publicised of the formerly-banned books have now been dealt with—and often their sales on release have been a flop.

Now Whitcombe and Tombs have published "The Indecent Publications Tribunal." by Stuart Perry, a foundation member of the tribunal. The book is described as "a detailed narrative account without the strong emotional tones usually found in books on censorship."

The contents are an assemblage of tribunal decisions, verbatim statute, a sketchy history of events preceding the passage of the Act, and a fuller account of the events following it.

As a record it is a useful book, and those interested in censorship will find it worth its price in this respect.

But it is not the book we are waiting for about censorship in New Zealand.

In writing what he is pleased to call "narrative history," Mr. Perry thinks he can attain impartiality only by dodging the crucial issues.

He does not attain true impartiality—one can sense his urge to proclaim each time a controversial topic approaches—but he does dodge the main issues.

In dodging these, he does not manage to supply a full back-ground for consideration of our censorship system.

Yet the tribunal chairman, Sir Kenneth Gresson, points to some of the main avenues for criticism in a foreword which shows his usual neat grasp of a controversial topic.

"It must be recognised that the functions of the newly created, tribunal are somewhat limited,", Sir Kenneth writes.

"It is not given a general authority of its own motion to exercise an oversight over publications."

The deficiencies this creates were clearly shown twice in the first year of the tribunal's operation. First, the Customs Department, possibly at the request of certain members of the public, circulated lists of books which they were pleased to label prohibited imports.

Second, the tribunal found itself forced to sit in judgment on a book—"Lady Chatterley's Lover"—already on open sale without restriction because the Minister of Justice refused to submit the hardcover edition to the tribunal.

Mr. Perry mentions, these events, but does not comment on them. It may be argued that it would be inappropriate for a tribunal member to make such comment, and this could be true.

But a failure to discuss such issues, linked with a failure to discuss the serious legal deficiencies in the act, combine to weaken the value of the book.

The powers under the act to censor work in manuscript form, the failure to define indecency, and the imposition of absolute liability on some offenders raise important moral issues.

Nor does Mr. Perry's discussion of earlier censorship procedures merit a better judgment than sketchy. Readers will have to return to the background material for fuller detail, although it is to Mr. Perry's credit that the main references are given,

Recent legal writers in the New Zealand Law Journal and the Otago Law Review have lambasted the act in language, for them, unusually strong.

"The new act is an absurd production of the legislature and its servants; a clumsy, unworkable, repetitious pot-pourri which does not even define indecency." (NZ Law Journal, 1964. page 422.)

The Indecent Publications Tribunal, by Stuart Perry. Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. 1965. 169pp. 27/6, Reviewed by H. B. Rennie.