The 80 page Senate Committee report into rude words on television is full of bizarre material. Take for instance Media Standards Australia, which believes that the problem with offensive material isn’t that it offends people, it is that it exists at all:

Sadly, however, the more concerned people do just switch off, the longer the unacceptable levels of offensive material continue unchecked, and uncommented upon. One cannot complain about something that one does not see.

But the Senate committee is not all laughs. One significant regulatory proposal in the report is dumped in at the end of a long discussion on parental responsility – a mandatory “parental lock-out” on all new digital televisions sold in Australia. This sounds similar to the American V-Chip which was made mandatory in new US televisions from 1999 onwards.

On the face of it, a mandatory parental control seems like a good idea, if you’re into that sort of thing. V-Chips appear to ‘empower’ parents. And while implementing a parental lockout would impose a cost on consumers, it would probably not be very large. If other regulatory burdens placed upon electronic equipment are anything to go on, the price of adding a small microchip to new electronics will be fairly quickly be reduced to irrelevancy.

But in the United States, the V-Chip has not been a very successful program. Despite 70-80 per cent of parents claiming in surveys that they have “serious concerns” about inappropriate television programming, in 2004, only 15 per cent of those parents actually used the V-Chip.

This suggests that either parents are exaggerating their concern, or are monitoring their children’s viewing in some other way. Or perhaps they are not aware of the V-Chip’s existance – a possibility which has led some American policymakers and lobbyists to suggest that the parental controls should have their defaults set at the highest possible restriction at the factory.

It is hard not to wonder why parents too lazy to quickly check about the parental controls they already have embedded in their television – yet who still profess deep concern about their kids viewing habits – are the government’s responsiblity.

Why does the government need to impose a mandatory V-Chip on Australian televisions in the first place? The Senate report unconvincingly dismisses the traditional argument about ‘parental responsiblity’ by contending that ‘economic and societal’ pressures meant that often children are unattended around televisions, or that televisions are often situated in children’s rooms.

But in many of these cases the solutions are obvious.

For instance, the problem of a television in a child’s bedroom could perhaps be solved by removing the television from the child’s bedroom. And certainly, as the Senate report notes, many children get home from school before their parents get home from work, but the 3:30pm to 7pm period is hardly the rudest few hours on television – current classification guidelines already take care of that potential issue.

And there is no reason that the private sector cannot deal with the issue of childrens’ television consumption by itself. Many digital set top boxes already include parental controls – it should be fairly simple for parents to inquire at purchase time which ones have this feature.

Adam Thierer points out in his Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods that at no other time in history have there been more tools for parents to manage the consumption of their children’s media. As digital television seeps through the Australian marketplace, those options will only continue to expand.