As in Great Britain and Canada, every film made publicly available in Australia must go through a classification process before it can be legally exhibited or distributed. A national government body, the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), administrates the laws and regulations used to determine a film's classification. Also, like the BBFC in Britain and the OFRB in Ontario, Canada, the OFLC significantly refined its guidelines in the mid-to-late-1990s, shifting focus away from conventional censorship (at least in theory) and toward film classification, duly implementing the Commonwealth Classification Act in 1996. The Act (which applies to publications, films, and computer games) was introduced at a time when censorship controversies had been relatively sparse in Australia for a decade. Two of the act's prominent points are: “(a) adults should be able to read, hear, and see what they want;” and “(d) the need to take account of community concerns …”—seemingly mutually exclusive points that strive for balance between acknowledging the necessity of freedom from restrictive censorship and tacitly advocating for its use (Lacey 58). Within the uneasy balance, the Act aims for—in a phrase—liberalized censorship.

The 1996 shift did not prove immediately problematic—that is until its newly expanded scope and limits were tested by the films of the New French Extremity—most notably Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi's Baisemoi (2000). The intense erotic thriller's seemingly endless capacity to strike up controversy wherever it was exhibited or submitted proved especially challenging for Australian censors, who feared the social harm posed by the film's “excessive” hyper-stylized sexual violence.

Despite responsibility for enforcing its laws, the OFLC does not itself typically determine a film's classification status. This task instead falls upon the reviewers who comprise the Australian “Classification Board,” a group of twenty “ordinary folk” who watch every film submitted for classification to assess the level of violence, sex, profanity, drug use, and nudity, and make recommendations for suitable age categories based on these classifiable factors (McKenzie 52).