Quite unannounced, the Rudd Government has imposed fines totalling thousands of dollars as a result of raids on adult shops, forcing some out of business and sending the proprietor of a retailer in Sydney's Oxford Street to prison for three months.

The sentence was imposed by a Sydney Magistrate for selling blue movies and confirmed on appeal. The proprietor Daryl Cohen began his sentence last month.

He is, as far as can be established, the first person to go to prison for the victimless crime of pornography for more than 60 years.

Cohen's shop sold sex toys and erotic videos on Sydney's gay mile. His shop was raided under the auspices of the Minister for Home Affairs Brendan O'Connor by police who seized his stock of an estimated 4,000 DVD's, combed through them and singled out 43 as the basis of a charge of selling pornography.

It is not illegal to possess X-rated DVD's but in the states it is illegal to sell them. Cohen's stock had not been classified, which costs $850, depending on running time, for each DVD. The police submitted the 43 most graphic of the confiscated films to the Australian Classification Board paid the classification fee and were informed that 38 were acceptable for import into Australia under the X-classification, but that five should be assigned to the category of Refused Classification, because they depicted homosexual bondage and sado-masochistic acts.

A magistrate thereupon sentenced Cohen to three months imprisonment. He appealed to the District Court, where a judge decided that Cohen would be unable to pay a fine of $11,000 a video, totalling perhaps $500,000.

He was broke, and living at home with his aunt.

The magistrate therefore confirmed the sentence of three months imprisonment, which Cohen is now serving, believed to be the first jailing of a censorship offender since 1945, when Robert Close was imprisoned for writing a novel entitled "Love Me Sailor".

His friends have told the Eros Association, which is the industry body, that Cohen is taking it badly and has already lost 15 kilos.

The sentence on Close produced extensive media coverage, and prompted a reaction against legal wowserism. The pendulum, which had resulted in the banning of two notable works of fiction, DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, and James Joyce's Ulysses, not only in Australia but elsewhere in the world, began to swing back.

Redeeming Literary Merit became a defence, and censorship crumbled in the Western world.

Retailers began selling erotic DVD's in the states, capturing the mail-order market that operated out of the ACT and the Northern Territory. The police ignored this "crime" and got on with hunting down drug deals and keeping a watch for terrorists.

And then it changed. The Rudd Government moved the censors to Canberra gave them a new name, the Australian Classification Board, and an investigatory arm with a doublespeak title, the Classification Licensing Service.

Two public servants were assigned to visit retailers selling erotic DVD's. When they found something they did not like they wrote to the police on Attorney-General letterhead, prompting police to initiate prosecutions.

There were fines, escalating from perhaps $1,000 to $50,000. Then police found the hapless Cohen, who has been ruined by the seizure of his stock.

It was back to the bad old days of Arthur Calwell and Bob Menzies, who imposed sales tax on contraceptives, presided over book-banning, and tried to ban the Communist Party, but with an important difference.

The jailing of Robert Close drew intensive media coverage. The jailing of Daryl Cohen, with the exception of a paragraph or two in the gay press, has drawn none. He has disappeared behind bars without a trace. No fuss. No outcry. No questioning of the principle of censorship, which in its fundamental says that some of us are entitled to read and see all published material, and then to rule that the rest of us cannot.

Nobody asked the question: who has suffered loss because Cohen sold blue movies, either as damage to property or personal injury. As with Close's imprisonment, we are back in the days of "crimes" without victims, "crimes" which do no harm to anyone.

There are no longer members of parliament like Lionel Murphy, Gareth Evans and Don Chipp prepared to put up a fight for the rights of individuals and for freedom of speech.

Instead, since the days of Paul Keating we are looking for ways to tighten the purity laws, with none more zealous than the Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, who when he is not engaged in destroying Telstra is combing the internet for images he finds offensive.

In NSW Kristina Kenealy has announced that redeeming artistic merit is to be removed as a defence against prosecution.

This is not an issue that affects only people with shops in Oxford Street selling DVD's without, it must be conceded, not a lot of redeeming artistic merit.

The Rudd government added a new question to the customs declaration form that returning travellers must fill out at airports. Are you carrying firearms, drugs and now, for the first time, pornography, for which there is no legal definition. Is Playboy porn. Or Deep Throat, or those jokes that circulate on the internet?

Already there are instances where people have had their lap-tops seized, regardless of the files, correspondence, diary entries and financial accounts that are nobody's business but that of the owner of the lap-top, and whose loss can have a severe impact on the owner's work.

Australia is a live-and-let-live country, except at the top. On the basis of the polls, we do not support banning erotic videos. There is no demand for a return to wowserism, which has nevertheless crept back into our lives, like a metastasising cancer, with nobody on either side of the federal parliament prepared to speak up, as Lionel Murphy, Gareth Evens and Don Chipp once did, and in the NSW State Parliament, with only the Greens prepared to have a go.

Close, an acclaimed writer of sea stories, spent most of the rest of his life in France. He died in 1995.

An embarrassed Customs service, now that their new question to returning holiday makers has been publicised, is looking for an alternative form of words that does not sweep up the two million people who buy blue movies.

David Barnett is a journalist and farmer.