Will Rau right R18+ wrongs?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 26 March 2010 09:28

Your IT - Entertainment

Gamers of Australia are hoping that South Australia's new Attorney General, John Rau, will live up to Gamers4Croydon's Chris Prior tweet that he's a nice guy, is a supporter of the R18+ classification for games and that R18+ is on his to do list.

Although the Gamers4Croydon group, which could easily have been named Gamers4Australia, was unsuccessful in unseating former South Australian (SA) Attorney General (AG) Michael Atkinson from the seat of Croydon, it was spectacularly successful in gaining 3.7% of the vote.

This is important because Atkinson didn't think that Gamers4Croydon would receive even 1% of the vote, but as noted at the G4C news page, not only did G4C gain around four times the number of votes that Atkinson predicted, a respectably large 14% swing against Atkinson was recorded.

While Atkinson is still the member for Croydon, Atkinson seemingly saw the writing on the wall and decided to bow out of his Attorney Generalship, wishing instead to let new blood, so to speak, take up the role.

That role is now in the hands of formerly unknown SA backbencher John Rau, now very known, and the hopes of gamers for an R18+ rating for games has re-ignited in a way that was simply never possible while Atkinson remained in the role.

According to Gamers4Croydon's Chris Prior at his Twitter page, Prior said on March 23 that 'New SA Attorney-General is John Rau, a supporter or the R18+ classification for games (and a nice guy, to boot)'.

Then on March 25, Prior followed this with another Tweet, stating 'SA AG, John Rau : "I've got a list of things I want to look at and one of those is the R-rated classification of video games".

None of this is any guarantee that an R18+ rating is now in the bag, and despite the next meeting of Australian Attorneys General due for April 29 in Melbourne, no-one in the public yet knows whether the R18+ rating will be raised at this meeting, or if it will be put off until a future meeting.

What do we really know about John Rau? Some details are on page two, please read on.