Moral cleansers past their use-by date

MRS Grundy was immortalised as the universal wowser by literary giants such as Charles Dickens and James Joyce. She was the neighbour from hell who disapproved of anything new, from the colour of your house to the latest obscenity at the bookshop. Her creator, 18th-century playwright Thomas Morton, never actually brought her to life on the stage, preferring to make her a much more potent character through her invisibility.

Her universal opposite was another unseen but all-pervasive character immortalised in English common law, the reasonable adult. Unlike Mrs Grundy, who judges all things through her narrow set of values, the reasonable adult is often described as someone endowed with standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted in present-day society.

John Howard (a Methodist, like Mrs Grundy) managed to purge the Australian system of government of just about all its reasonable adults. He turned small-l Liberal ministers such as Philip Ruddock and Helen Coonan (matron of the John Stuart Mill group, no less) into mega-Grundys within just a few short years. He carefully installed puritans in key positions throughout government departments and agencies and has left us with a wowserish administration that is ill-fitted to deal with the progressive nature of modern Australian society....

With Howard gone, it's time for the new Attorney-General, Robert McLelland, to step in and modernise Australia's classification scheme for nonviolent erotica. The best way to do that would be to get some truly national uniform laws in place that express the nation's real moral codes and not those of Mrs Grundy and a number of nanny states, writes Ross Fitzgerald.

Aust 7 Jan 2008