Mr MURPHY (7:28 PM) —I refer to an article which appeared in the Catholic Weekly on 26 March concerning the general run of movies we are experiencing in Australia. In this article Father Brian Lucas answers a question put to him in an article titled `Movies attack values'. Father Lucas says:

In light of Father Lucas' observations, I have in the forefront of my mind the movie Dogma, which was a blatant attack on Christian belief systems and brought the management of Village Roadshow Pty Ltd into serious disrepute for their blatant contempt for contemporary social values and religious beliefs. We have had a spate of movies classified by the Office of Film and Literature Classification, including the movie Romance, designed to undermine social values and further attack religious beliefs. It is difficult to understand why the office's classification boards permit the classification of such rubbish. The trend of film classification is clearly that more violent, more offensive movies are being classified by the Office of Film and Literature Classification and are therefore being legally permitted to be exhibited by distributors in Australia—thereby encouraging, indeed materially assisting, the production of such rubbish. In the Catholic Weekly article I have already referred to, Father Lucas goes on to give prudent advice to the cinema artists about their duties, and this is worth citing in the House tonight. To the cinema arts industry, Father Lucas says:

I would now like to cite the related issues of violence and sex in our media. These presentations are demeaning of human dignity. They expose us, in our participation as spectators, to the unfolding evil that is burnt into our consciousness. This is especially true for the young, who are particularly vulnerable and impressionable.

I am also very grateful to have been provided with a copy of a very relevant book from the local pastor of the Ashfield Presbyterian Church, the Reverend Peter Hastie. The book is On Killing, written by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman. This authoritative text deals with the psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society. The Reverend Peter Hastie also provided me with a copy of an article published in the Australian Presbyterian, titled `Trained to Kill', also written by Lieutenant Colonel Grossman, which explains how the media conditions children to pull the trigger. Lieutenant Colonel Grossman identifies, in his chapter titled `Killing in America', the incidence of desensitisation of children at the movies and `operant conditioning at the video arcade'. He further highlights the importance of social learning through the media. Lieutenant Colonel Grossman then goes on to identify ways in which we, as a society, must resensitise society through these same media.

Church leaders and military and psychology experts agree that there is a causal link between what we see in the media and how persons behave. Many crimes can be linked to violence portrayed in the movies. Therefore, the parliament has a moral responsibility, together with parents and other moral and legal guardians, to protect the societal and religious values of those who are too young or too frail to protect themselves from such influence. The young, with a higher propensity to go to movies, are the ones whose minds are so adversely affected by violence and sexual content. Such content weakens their moral tendency towards their natural state of human dignity and moves their intellect towards a degraded mode of human existence. Our duty is to protect the young and others from the unscrupulous movie producers and distributors who seek to make ill-gotten gains by poisoning the minds of people and mocking the churches and other groups to obtain cheap publicity. I commend church leaders like Father Lucas and the Reverend Peter Hastie in their efforts to defend public morality. We, as members of parliament, also have a duty to defend those who are most vulnerable from the villains who seek to diminish, degrade, obstruct or otherwise contaminate those cherished spiritual and societal values.