Page 1221 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 24 April 1990
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responsibility back on parents to know where their children are, to know what they are doing and what they are watching. As a fairly avid newswatcher, I often find myself in the position of having my six-year-old ask me questions about something that is rather questionable. I take the approach of a number of psychologists who recommend that this is a perfect opportunity to help to mould your children's view by discussing with them those aspects of issues that you find objectionable. Matters that some people find objectionable are, of course, not objectionable to others. What we are discussing here tonight is a matter of value judgments.
The evidence that I have read on X-rated material - and I have quite a lot of it here - shows that there is no link that one can establish between X-rated material and violence. On the contrary, where a link can be established, it can be established between domestic violence and repression. Repression is a much greater danger to our society than the notion of non-violent erotica. There is no evidence that I have come across that establishes, in a reasonable way, a relationship between non-violent erotica and violent acts, as is suggested by many people in the lobby and as has been suggested again and again by Dennis Stevenson.
What are the motives for these people to present their arguments in this way? What would psychologists say about people who have a preoccupation with repression, sexual pornography and these sorts of materials? How often have we heard them objecting to R-rated movies? On a number of occasions I have seen such movies, and there is a relationship there between sex and violence. Yet those movies are available and we never hear objections to them.
This campaign against pornography that these people talk about is a campaign about sexual repression. The evidence that they provide is anecdotal at best. When Mr Stevenson introduced this Bill he read from Linda Lovelace. We have also heard about Ted Bundy, the serial killer, who now claims that his killings were related to pornography. These people have one thing in common: they do not want to face up to the fact that they should take responsibility for their past actions that they now consider wrong. They are saying, in effect, "It was not me. I did not go out and kill all those people, certainly not. It was the pornography that did it, not me".
Even in the case of Ted Bundy we are talking about a combination of violence and erotica; we are not talking about the material which is classified in Australia as X-rated and which contains no violence. It does not even contain coercion or non-consent of any kind. That is the material we are talking about. It does contain very explicit sexual acts with very close-up pictures. I have now seen four of these pictures myself and I was not as repelled by them as I was by a number of R-rated movies.
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