Following the most recent Australian parliament cabinet reshuffle, there was a bit of uncertainty around the future of the proposed introduction of an R18+ rating for videogames in Australia. Previous Minister for Home Affairs Brendan O'Connor had been a driving force in advocating the change, but we had yet to hear the new guy's thoughts on the matter and it's been quite some time since we've heard of any new developments at all.
GameSpot-AU have
reached out to the office of the new Home Affairs Minister MP Jason Clare (formerly Minister for Defence Materiel) for an update on proceedings and have learned that the bill is currently planned to land in the House of Reps in parliament's first session, commencing early February.
According to Gamespot, Clare's office explained that the bill would require support of cross-bench MPs in the lower house, but did not elaborate on why they expected that the Federal Opposition would vote against it. Should the bill pass the lower house, it will then require support of either the Greens of Coalition to succeed in the Senate.
As a somewhat trivial issue among more important topics currently circling Australian parliament, it's not likely that we'll get much more indication as to which way each of the parties and independent MPs might lean until the debates actually happen, but stay tuned for any more significant developments in this tired tale as they develop.
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Posted 01:23am 27/1/12
Everyone's so f*****g caught up with the bloody children that they're ignoring the REAL problems. Bad parents and adult gamers getting fubar'd.
But then again, welcome to politics *eyeroll*.
Posted 05:27am 27/1/12
Posted 04:41pm 28/1/12
It should be as much about providing adult entertainment as it should be for "protecting the children".
But instead, if they do it that way, nothing will actually change except even LESS money will go into the games industry from Australia, making us even less of focus in the industries eyes. I mean, we don't exactly provide a massive amount of income as is, they'd have even less incentive if we suddenly lost all the cod kiddies. *shudder*
Posted 05:40pm 28/1/12
Because blacatvision are so strapped for cash to make there next cod4 map pack.
Australia is a low market for many game devs, heaps of companies just refuse to release the game here due to our stupid laws as gamers in this country are treated like 15 year olds, isnt it something like the average gamer in Australia is 28?.
Posted 08:19am 29/1/12
And yeah, while the average gamer might be older, the kiddies are still seen (in the eyes of most of the un-gamer population) as the main focus of games, so no-one is thinking of the adults in all of this.
Last I heard of the R18 law they were talking about introducing, it did nothing to help the adult gamers out, it just shifted everything up a rating (pretty much). Stuff that was RC'd before would still be RC'd even with the R18 they were talking about bringing out.