Domestic censorship of the largely left-wing controlled student press began indirectly in 1994 with the targetting of student publications in state Western Australia by Liberal Party officials. Months later the state Victorian government (Liberal controlled) passed the Tertiary Education Amendments Act, preventing students from publishing student newspapers out of university entrance fee funds.

The 'Rabelais Four' fiasco occurred after a series of other events targeting Australian youth. The most notorious was the vilification of the Paxton family after they refused to accept jobs at a Queensland tourist resort in a staged-for-ratings campaign managed by 'A Current Affair' which dropped toxic anti-youth memes into the national mindscape. Occurring just before a national federal election, the Paxton affair and 'Rabelais Four' prosecution were used by spin-doctors to manufacture consent and assist the Prime Minister, John Howard, to later introduce diary-surveillance systems and a restrictive Common Youth Allowance.

In 1995 the four editors of the La Trobe University student publication 'Rabelais' (Ben Ross, Michael Brown, Melita Berndt, Valentina Srpcanska), were arrested for publishing an article titled 'The Art of Shoplifting' (vol 29., ed 6., Rabelais, 1995), which had previously appeared in four other publications without problems. La Trobe University was the most avowedly left-wing and socially conscious state university, and a long-time home-base for radical political organizations and dissenting student activists. Charged with violating censorship codes, the editors potentially faced six year jail sentences and $72 000(Australian) fines each.

The campaign occurred four months after the article's publication when the edition was discovered by the Retail Trader's Association, which immediately called for the entire edition to be pulped. Subsequently attacked by controversial radio broadcasters Neil Mitchell and John Laws, the editors became the focus of political hate campaigns which immediately led to the withdrawing of funding for all student university publications within Victoria. Leaked letters from the Department of Social Security welfare agency revealed that high-level government officials were monitoring the case and the accused. Radical political organizations fighting such issues as uranium mining, environmentalism, native Aboriginal rights, youth poverty, and trans-national corporate abuse immediately suffered by losing their inter-campus communications network.

The prosecution dragged on over four years, and became a legal 'test case' which showed that the supposed Constitutional protection of political communication freedom was not guaranteed. Under the Federal Court's Justice Peter Heerey's extremely narrow definition of freedom of speech, even the works of Mahatma Gandhi would not be protected, as they would fail to "support, foster, and protect . . representative democracy and the rule of law." Justice Heerey compounded the hypocrisy of this ruling by publishing in full the controversial article on the Federal Court web site in its March 1998 decision. The site was subsequently refused by the Classification Review Board of the Office of Film and Literature.