Thursday, 15 August 2019

 Mr QUILTY (Northern Victoria) (18:15): My adjournment item is for the Attorney-General. DayZ is an open world video game, the kind of game that lets people live out their fantasies—fantasies like struggling to avoid being eaten by zombies, always being short on ammo, being killed on sight by people who turn out to be basement-dwelling video gamers and listening to those same people lose their minds when they hear a girl in the voice chat.

There are plenty of bad experiences to be had in DayZ, yet the one that attracted a ban was far less sinister. The developers planned to include cannabis to heal the player’s character—medicinal cannabis. This was seen as encouraging drug use and attracted a refused classification rating, which is a ban in Australia. What makes this ban especially absurd is that Australia has an R18+ classification for video games. If the game is too mature for young audiences, the classification system has a place for it. Despite this, the classification board refused classification for DayZ. This is a ban.

Refusal of classification should be reserved for illegal materials, things like child pornography and snuff films that should never have been created in the first place. It should not be used for zombie survival video games. Sadly the developers of DayZ have caved and they are removing cannabis from the game worldwide. Australia is once again the wet blanket and laughing-stock of the whole world. It is an embarrassment that we obediently let our government treat us like children. While the rest of the world is legalising cannabis, we are banning representations of cannabis in video games.

Though the actual classification of video games is federal, the enforcement of classifications is state based. I call upon the Attorney-General to explore and implement options that would allow games that contain adult themes, including showing drug use, to be sold for adult consumption here in Victoria.