A Censorship Challenge
Mr. Calwell, Australian Minister of Information, has made Press censorship controversial to a degree for which no other British Dominion provides a parallel. When the President of the Newspaper Proprietors' Association, who is also general manager of the Sydney Morning Herald, wrote a reply to the Minister's complaints about the Press, much of this reply was itself censored, and when the Sydney Daily Telegraph was printed on Saturday with blank spaces the whole issue was suppressed, and other papers, following suit, suffered the same fate. No sooner had the Commonwealth Govern- ment instituted proceedings against the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sydney Daily Telegraph for alleged breaches of the censorship regulations than the papers themselves went to the High Court and have been granted an injunction restraining the officials from pre- venting publication of a censored article. One of the judges declared that he could find nothing in the banned articles which would give information or be useful to the enemy. In Australia the feeling is just as strong as it always has been in this country that the censor- ship should only be used to prevent the publication of matter helpful to the enemy, and that to use it to protect the Government against criticism would be intolerable. That principle has been thoroughly established in Australia. The arbitrary action of the Commonwealth Minister has, as might easily have been foreseen, evoked a storm of protest from the Press, and there are indications that the general public feels equally strongly. The political Opposition has taken up the cudgels on behalf of freedom of opinion, Mr. Menzies going so far-as to describe the Government's treatment of the Press as " Nazi technique pure and simple." He appears to be not far wrong.
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