Law Professor On Publications Bill

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30231, 9 September 1963, Page 12

Law Professor On Publications Bill

The Indecent Publications Bill was a desirable, although restricted, improvement, said Professor H. R. Gray, professor of law at the University of Canterbury, yesterday. He was speaking at the regional conference of the Canterbury branch of the New Zealand Library Association.

Librarians, he said, would have a better chance of reasonable decisions with the tribunal to be set up under the provisions of the bill than they had with “some Customs official.” Critics of the bill had been attacking it mainly on peripheral matters instead of dealing with the “appalling mess of the present machinery.”

No longer would a minion in the Customs Department be able to decide on the decency or otherwise of a book, he said. Any differences would be settled by the tribunal. “I think the tribunal is capable of being a vast improvement.” he said. “The rules of its membership and the revised criteria laid down for decisions will ensure a balanced judgment.” He said the balance of public interest between the suppression of dirt and freedom of literary expression must be drawn free of any emotional content. At present the discretion of the Minister of Customs was unfettered and his judgment was not bound at all. He could use subjective and emotional judgment. “Lolita” Decision In the case of “Lolita” the Minister had permitted the book to be imported, but revoked his permission after a complaint. He had called the book “sophisticated smut.” and it did not seem that he had brought

any objective judgment to bear. Professor Gray said the use of Anglo-Saxon monosyllables was just a matter of taste, because they could be heard very readily on the wharf at Lyttelton. Judgment on the question of taste was a deplorably emotive type of judgment. The criteria in the bill concerning literary merit underlined one of the real problems. That was that the person who laid an information under the Indecent Publications Act did not usually have much education in literature anyway, and his judgment of that question was worthless. Professor Gray said he was least haippy about the right of appeal to the Court of Appeal on the tribunal’s decisions. "But it may be.” he said, “that their judgments under the new criteria wiM not be split as they have in the past.” He called the bill an attempt at increased liberality. Bookseller's Views Mr Gordon Tait, a bookseller who addressed the same conference, said there was no factual support for the bill's basic assertion—that immorality was caused by the reading of indecent publications. Using an overseas research figure showing that only 2.7 per cent of a group of delinquent children read either comics or books, Mr Tait said this meant 210 of the 7780 juvenile offenders in New Zealand in 1960—0 r 0.008 per cent of the whole population.

To protect that small proportion of the population, the law-makers proposed to coerce the remaining 99.992 per cent with a harsh law that removed the rights of newspapers and tampered with the legal system. Mr Tait said that if the bill became law it would take the responsibility of making decisions from the community severally and vest it in a tribunal. At the same time it would not make it any more difficult for those who would wilfully purvey pornography. However, it would make the job of the honest bookseller incredibly more difficult. He said positions on the tribunal would “most likely be handed out to retired public servants, to men who know a cushy good thing when they see it.”