“CENSORSHIP EXCESS”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25514, 19 April 1944, Page 5

“CENSORSHIP EXCESS”

NO ISOLATED OUTRAGE SYDNEY PAPER’S COMMENT (N.Z.P.A. Special Aust. Correspondent) (Rec. 9 p.m.) SYDNEY, Apl. 18. Enormous interest has been aroused in the controversy around the banning and seizure of Sydney and Melbourne newspapers. With court actions pending, the matter remains sub judice and all the papers to-day refrain from comment. The eventual repercussions ’may be extensive, since the affair has gone far beyond the mere censorship issues originally involved. “The suppression by the censorship authorities of yesterday’s issue of the Sunday Telegraph is an outrage in the worst style of totalitarian dictatorships, which numbered the abolition of the .freedom of the press among their first objectives,” declared Monday’s Sydney Morning Herald in an editorial originally banned by the censorship, but subsequently permitted for publication by order of the Full Court of the Australian High Court. “ This seizure,” the paper adds, “ was no isolated outrage, but the culmination of a series of abuses in the restriction of the press’s rights of criticism in matters wholly unrelated to public security. “ The censorship, has proceeded from one excess to another, each . time further invading the field of newspaper freedom and arrogating to itself powers of suppression never remotely contemplated when the system was erected at the beginning of the war, and utterly at variance with the Prime Minister’s own recent affirmation of Government belief that the censorship should be limited to the withholding of information useful to the enemy. “The facts now placed before the public show in the clearest fashion that the censorship, which is controlled by Mr A. A. Calwell, as Minister of Information, is seeking to set up a dictatorship over news and opinions in Australia. It has become frankly and unashamedly political. Sydney newspapers have now taken • the whole issue before the tribunal of public opinion, to which even Mr Calwell must ultimately bow. For this is far from being a question which concerns the press alone.” The Herald continues: “The right of freedom of speech and publication is fundamental to the functioning of democracy. It is the very lifeblood of free institutions. Newspapers can exist and flourish financially and otherwise under official tutelage as experience in Gestapo-ridden countries has shown. They cah be dependent and servile and still prosper. But where they are acquiescent in the suppression of their own freedom, liberty itself decays and dies.” The banned statement by the chairman of the Australian Newspaper Proprietors’ Association, Mr R. A. Henderson, also . released for publication by the court order, included “ examples of the manner in which the censorship has been abused in this country.” The examples related largely to industrial and political events. A second statement by Mr Henderson Said: “Not one of the examples of censorship which I gave in my earlier reply to Mr Calwell had any remote relation to national security. They were all examples of political censorship. With the weapon of wartime regulation up his sleeve, Mr Calwell is free to make venomous personal attacks on individuals, and then prevent them from giving the facts that would answer him.” As well as this previously banned material, to-day’s Sydney papers also carry reproductions of the front page of the suppressed Sunday Telegraph, featuring in a three-column space from which the censored matter had been removed a panel stating: “A freepress ? The Great American democrat, Thomas Jefferson, said: ‘Where the press is free and every man is able to read all is safe.’ ” Illustrations are published showing yesterday’s crowds scrambling for copies of the banned papers and demonstrating against their suppression. Two pictures show Commonwealth peace officers with drawn pistols endeavouring to prevent truck drivers from removing the newspapers.