Page 2741 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 21 November 1989
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cutting all the long grass and so on, can be legitimately asked: where is the money supposed to come from? This is, as I have said, a money Bill. It is one that faces a few facts of life, and no matter how sincere its opponents are - and I fully acknowledge their sincerity - they need to do the same.
These videos are legally recognised. The Federal Government has seen to that. Despite a claim made by the Prime Minister in a letter to the member for Adelaide, Mr Pratt, on 29 May this year, responsibility for the standing of X-rated material has not passed to this Assembly. Not only are they recognised, but also their de facto economic status is affirmed and exploited in the tax system as it is.
The Government's Bill is therefore hardly bold. It is hardly the first step ever taken into a new and morally dubious terrain. It acknowledges a fully legitimate source of revenue and exploits that source just like any other tax. So there is little point in thinking, "An erotic video tax? Now, that is new and strange and different". The only difference is that we can all see it. We can all be reminded of it by this specific piece of legislation. It is not obscured by or mixed up with all the other sources of revenue and disguised from us, made distant, remote, impersonal. It is, if anything, an honest tax, and it has been attacked more because of its honesty than for any change it introduces to our moral climate.
Members will be aware that standing order 58 prevents us from speaking on matters which are irrelevant to the matter under debate. Under section 23 of the self-government Act, this Assembly has no power to make laws with respect to the classification of materials for the purposes of censorship.
It would be entirely appropriate to call to order any speaker who attempts to misuse this debate, which is about taxation, not about moral issues. But I suppose that whatever is said about this tax being, in effect, morally neutral, the debate is not going to be left there. The Bill has already provided the ground for much lobbying and comment directed at the nature of erotic videos, and some members of this Assembly may be keen to use the opportunity to establish their moral credentials. If they are, I would ask them to remember that the issues here are complex. They are certainly too complex to be unravelled and resolved in the time available for this debate.
A joint select committee of the Federal Parliament spent many months and several hundred pages reporting on erotic videos. They followed in the footsteps of numerous studies and parliamentary committees elsewhere in the world. Even so, the results were punctuated with dissenting reports and recommendations. Despite the majority recommendation for a new category - non-violent erotica - there was no final path to reconciling different perspectives. We are not about to succeed in the course of a debate on a revenue
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