By Jackie Lynch
MELBOURNE — After five years of campaigning and several appearances in the Federal and High courts, the Rabelais case is finally over. On March 24, the Victorian director of public prosecutions dropped the charges against the four 1995 editors of the La Trobe University student paper Rabelais. The editors had faced charges which carried a maximum penalty of six years' jail and a $72,000 fine.
However, this win for freedom of political expression is tempered by the precedent of censorship set by the decision of the full bench of the Federal Court to uphold the ban on the Rabelais article. That decision marked an increase in the already substantial powers exercised by Australian censors.
In June 1995 the editors printed a political satire about the redistribution of wealth called "The art of shoplifting". They were then subjected to an establishment media feeding frenzy over the degeneration of morals amongst youth and the grave danger shoplifting presented to "respectable" society.
Any ideas about the right to free speech were thrown out the window. Everyone from Neil Mitchell (3AW schlock jock, who drew the Victorian Retail Traders Association into the debate) and Melbourne's Herald-Sun bayed for the editors' blood.
On August 8 the then federal minister for education, Labor's Simon Crean, was cajoled by John Laws into promising that federal funding to the student paper would be cut and to determine whether the individual editors could be prosecuted.
Crean wrote to the Victorian attorney-general, Jan Wade (extraordinarily, he sent a copy of this letter to Laws). The editors were questioned by police on August 16 and 17 and were then charged with producing, distributing and depositing in a public place an "objectionable publication".
After this, the edition of Rabelais was subsequently banned by the Board of Literature and Film Classification, which deemed it "a publication which promotes, incites or instructs in matters of crime". The High Court also upheld this ban in December 1998 when it refused the editors leave to appeal against the ban.
The Rabelais case sparked a broad campaign in defence of political expression, supported by the Victorian Trades Hall Council, student unions, Victorian TAFE Students and Apprentices Network (VTSAN), the National Union of Students, Liberty Victoria and various unions and community organisations. Dozens of student newspapers, including Honi Soit, Catalyst, Arena, Semper, Gravity and Vertigo, reprinted the article. The editors of these papers were not charged.
In a bizarre legal twist, Justice Heery of the Federal Court was warned by the Australian government solicitor that he might have breached the law by publishing the banned article in the judgment which upheld its banning!
The case of the Rabelais editors is an object lesson in the willingness of mainstream media, the law, the government and business to censor subversive opinions. The victory of the Rabelais campaign was that these editors will not face fines or jail terms. The censorship laws, however, remain in place — they could be used against other publications and organisations which dare to express ideas defined as "objectionable" under capitalist law.