4g - Child protection rules 'too restrictive'

Joyce Morgan, smh.com.au, November 14, 2008

Anyone who photographs children will need the permission of the parents before the pictures can be exhibited.

The ruling is included in sweeping guidelines released by the Australia Council yesterday designed to protect children in the aftermath of the Bill Henson controversy. 

The six-page document also requires artists who work with naked children to ensure that their parents understand the nature of the artwork. Artists must also have a commitment from parents that they will supervise the naked child. 

But missing from the draft guidelines is any mechanism for policing them. 

A key visual arts organisation has described elements of the draft protocols as "unworkable".

The executive director of the National Association for the Visual Arts, Tamara Winikoff, said requiring artists who work with children to obtain parental permission was restrictive.

"That's problematic particularly for people like documentary photographers who work in the street," she said. "At the moment there are no restrictions on taking crowd photographs or photographs of people in the street without their permission. This would impose a very, very unreasonable restriction."

But missing from the guidelines was an earlier suggestion everyone who saw an artwork understood what they were looking at. 

The Australia Council had sought opinions on this in recent months, but it had been widely seen as impossible to implement.

The guidelines say images of nude or partly nude children taken over the past 25 years may need to be reviewed by the Classification Board before they can go on view. 

Where there is no law to enforce them, the protocols will work as a minimum standard and a reminder to everyone that they must obey the law. 

They will affect all projects funded by the Australia Council. From January 1, artists must adhere to the protocols if they want a grant from the Government's peak arts funding body. 

The Australia Council chief executive, Kathy Keele, said the draft aimed to help artists working with children do so with proper care and responsibility. 

"We believe that these draft protocols strike a good balance between upholding the right to freedom of artistic expression and the rights of children to protection from harm," she said.

The Arts Law Centre of Australia has questioned the need for protocols.

"Artists are already subject to a number of laws," a spokeswoman, Suzanne Derry, said. "The introduction of protocols creates an additional hurdle that artists have to jump to get funding."

The council is seeking comments on the draft protocols by November 27 and will publish the final guidelines on December 31.