Chief Censor of New Zealand

Censorship in New Zealand has changed over the years to reflect the demands for a more liberal application of the law on contentious publications.

The Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) is the government agency that is responsible for classification of all films, videos, publications, and some video games in New Zealand. It was created by the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993 and is an independent Crown Entity. The head of the OFLC is called the Chief Censor, maintaining a title that has described the government officer in charge of censorship in New Zealand since 1916.

Patricia Bartlett was a New Zealand conservative Catholic pro-censorship activist of the 1970s and 1980s and founded the Society for Promotion of Community Standards (SPCS). This organisation is still actively seeking tighter restrictions on the release of some publications.

After Parliament passed the Homosexual Law Reform Act 1986, New Zealand censorship regulatory bodies could not rely on previous case law and tribunal decisions based on the illegality of gay male sex. Accordingly, later that same year, in Howley v Lawrence Publishing, the Court of Appeal found that censorship regulators should base their decisions on social scientific and medical research. As a consequence, film, video and publication censorship became increasingly standardised. This led to the passage of the Film Publications and Videos Act 1993, which merged the previously separate Indecent Publications Tribunal, Chief Film Censor and Video Recordings Authority into a single agency, the New Zealand Office of Film and Literature Classification.

During the eighties and nineties, an increasingly proactive LGBT New Zealand community fought several test cases that expanded Howley's precedent to encompass all government censorship regulatory bodies. The Society for Promotion of Community Standards lost all of these cases, whether before the Indecent Publications Tribunal, High Court, Court of Appeal or the later Office of Film and Literature Classification.

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