Adult shopping Website AdultShop.com is said to be backing efforts to review Western Australian censorship proposals aimed at keeping minors from Adult Websites.
"I fully support a complete review of the Western Australian Censorship Act so that it better reflects the community standards of Western Australians," AdultShop.com Malcolm Day told ZDNet's Australian division. "Whether such a review comes under a state or federal jurisdiction is debatable."
Day also said using Internet filters would mean adults not having access to material the Office of Film and Literature Classification has passed as suitable for adults. "A system must be put into place that gives adults the right to view legitimate Adult content," he said, "while at the same time protecting minors and those people that may be offended by such content."
He said reviewing and changing the national censorship scheme would do more and do it more appropriately than just introducing an independent state-based scheme, because in his view Western Australian adults have the same attitudes toward Adult materials as their peers in the eastern states of the country.
Western Australia's opposition Liberal Party has tried to compel legislation to force Internet service providers to filter for Adult content, but critics have said that would be too expensive and present even more problems – similar to arguments over Net filtering in the U.S. and Britain.
"If Western Australia were to introduce their own classification system and operate outside of this federal body, they would have to perform and fund these tasks themselves," Day told ZDNet Australia.
Some Australian Internet service providers also prefer national approaches – and even beyond – to the censorship issue. "The truth is that we need an international effort," said Perth ISP iiNet managing director Michael Malone. "That's best coordinated at the federal level and international enforcement has been managed pretty well in recent years."
