End the OFLC's stranglehold on the Australian Arts

My name is Jacob Martin and I'm a Visual Arts student who believes that the OFLC has gone too far for too long. The Refused Classification category that the Office of Film and Literature Classification is often used as a blanket silencer of quality, confronting, emotional art in video games, film and printed materials like books. I'm tired of having to make apologies to other nations for the backwards looking way the OFLC classifies inspiring works as "not suitable for a reasonable adult". The lines are poorly drawn as to whom a reasonable adult is, but as a person who writes novels and makes photographic art and multimedia projects, as well as an autistic man whose brother (and carer) is a film graduate finding his way up through the local film industry here. We both believe in our creative work, though I'm embarrassed that local politics wants to limit both the mediums and the content that Australian creators in the arts can express themselves with.

This week there's been a lot of fuss over the LGBT film I Want Your Love, an American film that was due to be screened at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, but was removed and is likely to get an X18+ or RC category classification, effectively banning and censoring it. Considering that LGBT people as a whole have been nothing but helpful and friendly to me, a high functioning autistic man all my life, I can hardly support the censorship of LGBT films considering their generosity to me, a disabled man with social anxiety and related problems associated with the autistic spectrum.

Long have I yearned for an Australian arts scene devoid of this kind of censorship of bold, challenging and relevant art, in a nation whose young population who, growing tired of waiting for the future to arrive, import or illegally download creative and "pornographic" works to bypass this dinosaur, irrelevant institution that does not represent young Australians in the least.

I want the old, tired system of the OFLC censoring, banning, and silencing art of high, low and middle brows in this country to be put out to pasture. I'm sure I'm not the only one.