Bureaucracy May Delay Australian R18+ Rating Implementation

Australia's classification branch manager of applications David Emery warns that it could be at least two years before a recently proposed R18+ rating is actually implemented in the country. After years of debate, Australia's home minister and state attorneys general finally agreed in July to move forward with the R18+ rating, which would allow games targeted exclusively at adults to be sold legally in the country. But Emery, speaking at a Politics of Play debate at Macquarie University last night (as reported by Kotaku), noted that the new rating first has to go through a number of bureaucratic and legislative barriers that may delay its actual implementation. "It's got to go to Parliament, then there's changes that have to be made subsequent to that — to the Classification Act — to allow for people who have had a game that has gone to the classification board and been refused classification to then be resubmitted in some form, " Emery said. Those same changes will have to be implemented in individual state and territory legislatures as well, Emery noted, before the classification board can actually go about evaluating games for the new rating. "All of those things take ages," he said. "There are lots of delays. The answer is that it'll probably be another couple of years before we’ll be able to accept an application for an R18 game." The Australian government officially opened debate on the introduction of an R18+ rating in late 2009. A 2010 survey found a massive 98 percent majority of the Australian public supported the introduction of the rating.