I know about certain titles getting banned outright (Halloween, Hotline Miami 2) while some are released in the country with a form of censorship (such as the casino being forbidden to interact in GTA V, the corpses disappear in Left 4 Dead, etc.). even though those games have been classified abroad as there are other bodies for classification: CERO (JP), ESRB (US) or PEGI (EU) to list a few examples from other countries.
They’re all separate from rating movies (while apparently in Australia, they use the same rating system for movies in games) hence why they tend to get either banned outright or censored. Even if you import a copy from abroad into Australia, isn’t the existing classification enough? (Like if it’s rated M17 in the US, its roughly equivalent to a R18+ or if it has CERO C (15+) from Japan, similar to either a M or MA15+ rating).
Couldn’t an Australian gamer just be like, if they possessed a “banned” title in AU but has an foreign copy of that game with an existing classification from its country of origin, isn’t that already enough? It has a rating but not by the Australian Classification Board (rather its foreign counterpart specifically for games). Just argue that a M17 (ESRB) rating is closest to either a MA15+ or R18+. Same with CERO D (17+) or CERO Z (18+).
First you install censorship on things nobody will care enough to defend. Then you use a mature censor system to control people’s opinion on important themes.
It’s been a while, but the last time I checked, the Australian censorship board primarily limits works which can be sold in Australia. I believe that it’s explicitly legal for adults to own anything that doesn’t break any other laws (including decency and pornography laws, but those are surprisingly not terrible IMO), provided that they don’t buy it in Australia.
There are also some laws about using the postal service to transmit classified works, but I think they’re less restrictive; for decades there was a thriving mail-order pornography trade based in the ACT (which had more relaxed censorship than the other states).
If it’s a banned title in Australia, it’s still just as banned even if the box has a foreign rating on it. That rating doesn’t apply to Australia and uses entirely different standards for rating, so why would it be relevant? If I import an assault rifle from America, that wouldn’t make it legal to own in my country just because it’s legal to own there.
Each country has their own laws determining what is or isn’t appropriate. So just because a game has a certain rating in one country doesn’t mean it will have the same one in a different one.
Australia is also very strict with depictions of certain things. For example they have a law that says your game can’t show real life drugs giving you bonuses and power-ups. You can see this with the modern Fallout games where Med-X was initially supposed to be called morphine but the Australians word have banned the game from sale if it shipped with that. So they changed it to the fictitious Med-X.
I don’t know if that situation evolved a bit since, but Nintendo of Europe has had a lot of stupid crap happen to the Europe e-shop because of Australia (it was still the case mid-Switch 1).
Historically (mostly because they used to have the PAL standard like Europe), Australia was considered the same region as Europe for Nintendo. Somehow this survived long after the need for the PAL/NTSC distinction, as some level of joint management of e-shop for EU and Australia. Problem is, Australia is very trigger-happy when it comes to change a game rating, and Nintendo too when it comes to remove a game until rerating is validated. It took something like 6 months in some cases.
Example, Jamestown, a classic pew-pew pixel-style bird’s eye shoot’m up, removed from both stores for that long, despite the fact Europe’s own rating PEGI maintained a 7+ rating for it. Still have no idea what could have triggered Australia’s change of rating.