CENSORSHIP OF LITERATURE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18998, 20 October 1923, Page 8

CENSORSHIP OF LITERATURE.

The Minister of Customs has issued a careful, but perhaps not dazzlingly luminous, pronouncement in relation to the rather delicate question of the censorship • of literature, which has been discussed in and outside Parliament from time to time during the last few years. There may be some difference of opinion regarding the value of the result of the “ anxious consideration ’* which the Minister has given to a problem which perhaps, after all, is hardly of major importance. A curious feature of the situation which has hitherto existed has been the division of executive responsibility between the Justice, Customs, and Postal Departments. Associated with these triple agencies, but very much in the background and with masked countenance, the figure of that mysterious personage, the censor, has been conjecturally discerned. A police-court magistrate has occasionally made a fifth in this imposing cast of administrative characters. So far as we can gather from Die Ministerial statement, there is no intention of abandoning an arrangement which at least has the distinction of being elaborate. What Mr Dowuie Stewart apparently proposes is to add a sixth party in the shape of an Appeal Board, consisting of the Parliamentary Librarian, the Librarian of the Wellington Public Library, and a nominee of the New Zealand Retail Booksellers’ Association, with power to review the decisions of tho multiple authorities already mentioned, excepting, of course, the decisions of any court of law. It is a most respectably-con-stituted tribunal; and yet we are not at all sure that Mr Stewart has hit upon the right solution of the difficulty, if difficulty it be. It seems to us that simplification of procedure, rather than, further elaboration, is what is required. Instead of multiplying censors, might it not be well to recognise the fact that censorial activity could suitably be reduced to a low minimum? The publications .subjected to censorship are generally of two kinds, —these which are alleged to be indecent, and those which, as the Minister of Customs puts it, “ may, for the sake of convenience, be referred to as seditions. ’ As regards allegedly indecent publications, we are of opinion that the Act of 1910 contains all necessary provisions for dealing with the matter though, in deciding whether prosecutions or other prohibitive measures should be instituted, the rights of literary and sociological (as distinct from pornographic) freedom should be liberally recognised. In regard to .so-called seditious literature there is % growing feeling that, mischievous though much of it undoubtedly is, prohibition is calculated to do more harm than good. It furnishes a grievance which political extremists are not slow to exploit. It is a mistake to lend any show of reason, or even of plausibility, to the contention that liberty of utterance is being curtailed by executive authority. Moreover, there is reason to believe that tho familiar saying, “prohibition does not prohibit,” is at least partially applicable to the case.