The Press FRIDAY, JUNE 19, 1964 Censorship

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30471, 19 June 1964, Page 10

The Press FRIDAY, JUNE 19, 1964 Censorship

Those who imagined that the passing of the Indecent Publications Act last year had ended the nonsense in the censorship of books in New Zealand will be disillusioned by the curious treatment of Mary McCarthy’s “The Group”. In the last of many speeches he made on the act, the Minister of Justice (Mr Hanan) said that previously the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Customs or their departments persuaded importers or retailers of books to withdraw “indecent publications” by the expression of an informal opinion. “In contradistinction ”, Mr Hanan said the bill “provided that the character “ of books and other documents challenged should be ** determined by an independent judicial tribunal “ after a hearing in public; the decisions would be “ delivered in writing and in open Court ”. According to the Comptroller of Customs (Mr J. F. Cummings) his department decided about the end of March to place the book in the department’s “ category 6—to be detained and referred to head “ office ”, That might have been a reasonable exercise of the Customs Department’s functions —except that the Comptroller took no immediate steps to submit the book to the tribunal and that when he did act, he acted for a very odd reason.

The act does not specify the grounds on which the Comptroller should exercise his discretion, though they should presumably be in harmony with the more liberal attitude that inspired Mr Hanan’s act. That was not the case. The Comptroller made his decision “ after newspaper reports appeared that “ Victoria in Australia had banned the book, and that “ some police action had been taken in New South “ Wales ”. He was apparently not impressed by the free circulation of “The Group” in the United States and Britain, by the acclaim of critics in those countries, or by the Book Society’s choice of “ The “ Group ” as its “ Book of the Month ” for circulation to its members (including those in New Zealand). The Comptroller preferred to rely on the censorship that has made Victoria a laughing-stock in the world. It now transpires that, though the decision to place “ The Group ” in category 6 was taken “ about the “ end of March ”, no copies have so far been found or detained. No decision has been taken, therefore, by the Comptroller about referring the book to the tribunal—even though the Wellington Public Library has had copies for a considerable time. It is regrettable that a bureaucratic decision taken in secret and on what few people would regard as responsible grounds has deterred booksellers from selling a particular book, and deprived would-be readers. It is a pity that the Comptroller did not read the book before acting, because he might well have agreed with the reviewer of “ The Press ”. Last March our reviewer commented that “by extract- “ ing all emotion from such scenes Mary McCarthy is “ exposing the corpse of pornography in a bottle of “ formaldehyde. It is strange that some readers can “ be uncertain of the author’s intention to be funny “in these practices ”, But censors are not noted for their sense of humour.