MA15+ for Mature Audiences

Timelines: All, Australia Categories: 1990s, Australia, Classification, Country, Decade, Event, Film, Government, Institution, Media, National (of national significance), New category, Television MA15+ for Mature Audiences
Date: 1993
Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator II Judgment Day

Australia

After two shootings in Melbourne in the late 1980s, a National Committee on Violence was assembled to consider how to decrease violence. It found violence in the media a cause of great public concern. The classification guidelines were updated to restrict the level of violence allowed in the category of M for “mature audiences”, an advisory category that recommended viewing for over-fifteens, and R18+, a category which restricted content to those over eighteen. However, many in political spaces thought more could be done to address cultural products that combined aspects of action with thriller and suspense narratives. Titles such as The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991); Terminator 2: Judgement Day (Cameron, 1991); and Cape Fear (Scorsese, 1991) teetered on the borderline between M and R18+; although their use of disturbing themes seemed to warrant a higher rating, their narrative, high production values, and stylistic approach to representing violence made them hard to place within the classification system and adequately guide audiences. After Cape Fear was determined M by the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), Prime Minister Paul Keating found this made the M rating “absurdly broad” in scope and presented a “fundamental weakness” in the classification system. Keating exclaimed:

I find it difficult to accept the utility of a system which brackets Crocodile Dundee and Cape Fear in the same “M” category

(quoted in Brough, 1992).

The classification files on the above films indicate some support at a state level for the introduction of a new category between M and R18+. Western Australia in particular had been unhappy with The Silence of the Lambs receiving an M classification on appeal. The new MA15+ category was agreed upon in a meeting between Keating and industry executives in under half an hour (Summers, 2018). The category put a legal restriction on audiences under fifteen, who could not purchase or access cultural products without adult supervision. At the same time as announcing the MA15+ category, which could not be broadcast on television until after 9pm, Keating made the categories for television cohesive with the categories for the public exhibition of film. In 1988, consumer advice to accompany a classification, such as “disturbing themes” or “high level violence”, was introduced to further guide consumers. – Rachel Cole

Image from empireonline.com

Further reading:

Annual Report. Office of Film & Literature Classification and Film & Literature Board of Review. (1992) “Report on Activities”, OFLC: Sydney.

Australian Government Report. Australian Law Reform Commission (1991) “Censorship Procedure”, Report 55, 11 September, ALRC: Sydney.

Australian Government Report. National Committee on Violence (1989), “Violence today”, available at aic.gov.au/publications/vt

Newspaper article. Brough, J. (1992) “Keating ups the ante on TV violence”, Canberra Times, 12 November, p1. Accessed Trove database.

Newspaper article. Summers, A. (2018) “Smile it’s the PM women loved to hate”, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 October, www.smh.com.au

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