Page 1229 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 24 April 1990
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What is the result since? Yes, legislative bans in all States and an industry operating freely in those States, which industry, according to my advice, is no longer supplied largely from the ACT. New industries have sprung up interstate. A recent seizure of 7,000 unclassified pornographic videos interstate was not of items originating in the ACT. Why should we join this ineffectual parade so reminiscent of the repressive and corrupt 1960s?
What is possible is the regulation of the industry by law, ideally at a national level. At present there are bans in the States but not in the Territories. Clearly the bans in the States are not effective and this leads to cynicism amongst the community in relation to those particular laws. By choosing not to administer the law governing availability of X-rated videos within their respective areas, the States have exhibited the utmost hypocrisy and have looked to pass the buck to the ACT.
In an article published in Australian Society in July 1988 Beatrice Faust, author of Women, Sex and Pornography, made a number of interesting observations on the report of the Joint Select Committee on Video Materials. Senators Shirley Walters and Brian Harradine and Dr Dick Klugman, MHR, were members of that committee.
Ms Faust criticised several submissions which appear, in her opinion, to have a selective view of obscenity. These groups, she states, "refuse to see that if pornography degrades women it must also degrade both men and sex. They refuse to examine male homosexual pornography or bondage and dominance material featuring dominatrices and male victims".
These criticisms highlight the problems of definition and terminology. In the 1970 report of the United States Commission on Obscenity and Pornography it was noted that the commission declined to use the term "pornography" which, it states, "has no legal significance and because it most often denotes subjective disapproval of certain materials". The area of the commission's study had been marked by enormous confusion over terminology.
Nine years later, in the United Kingdom, the Williams Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship was quite happy to offer definitions on a range of terminology. More recently in Canada, the 1985 report of the Special Committee on Pornography and Prostitution, also known as the Fraser committee, concluded:
One of the clear impressions is of the lack of uniformity in the terminology.
In 1986, the report of the US Attorney-General's Commission on Pornography, the Meese commission, found that questions of terminology and definition were recurring problems in their hearings and deliberations; so, too, with the 1988 Australian Joint Select Committee on Video Materials where
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