The Australian federal government voted in June 2011 to introduce the R18+ rating, which federal minister for home affairs Brendan O'Connor estimated "would only take a couple of months", but David Emery in a Politics of Play debate is dubious:
There is legislation that's been put to Parliament about the changes. What happens next is a long process again. It's probably going to take another couple of years before you're actually going to get an R18 that you can apply for, like a conventional classification that you have today.
It's got to go to Parliament, then there's changes that have to be made subsequent to that – to the Classification Act – to allow for people who have had a game that has gone to the classification board and been refused classification to then be resubmitted in some form.
There also needs to changes made to each state and territories classification act, that needs to go through the exact same process that I've just described, except on a state level. All of those things take ages, there are lots of delays.
The answer is that it'll probably be another couple of years before we'll be able to accept an application for an R18 game.
So essentially, it will take as long as you did reading that full quote instead of just reading, "It's bureaucracy." Whatever the delays, it just means that games won't be able to receive the R18+ rating they deserve until much later, so Australians will still see mature content needlessly butchered from their video games.
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