Well, I discovered New Zealand's censored books list, today. Having lived my whole life in the Usa, the idea of a government completely banning literature is a new one to me.

The NZ office of censorship is here.

And this is a direct link to the Excel .xls spreadsheet they have on their website listing the banned and regulated books: banned books in New Zealand

Because it is a published list, I'm sure everyone who feels like it goes out and gets the books and reads them. So maybe it's not a big problem. But I think that banning books (and for that matter, films and music) is a very dark and filthy part of New Zealand's culture. You folks have much more serious problems with your youth getting out of hand, than we have in the States. You have a phenonomon we haven't seen since the 1950s - "boy racers" - where teens go out and antagonise the neighborhood... or organise a trip to Dunedin (The Undy-500) where college folks start burning cars in the streets. In contrast, our teens and young adults in the States get into mischief by opening a book, or going out to look at dirty internet sites. This is a much better situation.

The problems for a society which evolve out of vulgarity have to do with mass media - not with niche media.

I think it's good for a nation to control air pollution, so to speak - in the sense that it's damaging for a country to have the kind of mass media we have in the States - where organisations like Rupert Murdoch's Fox News poison people's minds. Whenever there is an imbalance where certain people have more power to convey their ideas than other people do, it's wise to regulate those media outets.

But free expression of outside-the-box ideas is centrally important to guarantee free thought. I was learning the New Zealand national anthem, today, and all those wonderful values which your nation aspires to can only be met in a nation where there is free thought. Thinking about foul things does not make you a bad person.

I hope that you folks, facing the reality of the days of anonymous interent communication, will come to see the futility of censorship in this, the 21st century.

Censorship is a blight on what I see as otherwise the best english speaking society in the world.