Page 1234 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 24 April 1990
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moving to the kind of world represented by early seventeenth century New England or late twentieth century Iran. We are not wishing to be cruel and punitive in our support for the central values of our societies.
Furthermore, there is, I hope, a place for bawdiness, sexual frivolity, the ethos of the maypole, as well as, on the other side, purity and sanctity. We certainly do not favour an almost unwholesome anti-sexuality. Indeed, by contrast, I would argue that sexuality, at its best, most fruitful and most loving, is best seen within family values.
On the other side of Caesar's coin, however, are societies so deluged by an extravagance of sexual excesses that the downfall of society values, based on a rejection of family relationships, is directly connected with dangers to the society as a whole. I invite your attention to many of the disastrous inner-cities of the United States; indeed, to make an obvious parallel, to the crack climate of our sister city, Washington DC, another national capital whose societal disasters are actually making that city unsafe as a place to live. We have to be concerned about the city as a society.
Is large-scale pornography to be Canberra's equivalent of crack? There is no doubt, based on the kind of evidence available in the US Attorney-General's report and in the two-volume report of our own Parliamentary Joint Select Committee on Video Material - and this is not anecdotal evidence - that there are lines which need to be drawn.
In one way, some of those lines are already drawn, as Mr Collaery has properly noted. We do not permit snuff movies, videos about bestiality or child-molesting. In other words, censorship already exists. The question then is: where, in a strong and healthy society with sound family and personal values, should those lines be drawn? If, indeed, they were carefully drawn at what might legitimately and honestly be called "non-violent erotica", a kind of aesthetically pleasing, even inspirational form of artistic expression, then we might not need to worry. I refer you to the sonnets of Shakespeare as non-violent erotica.
But that is not what is offered week by week in the sleaze magazines. You only have to read the titles to know that what is being offered is two-dimensional sexual degradation, particularly degrading to women. I refer to the issue of People for 24 April 1990, which has 13 pages of advertising in one part, 11 of which are about sleaze and hard-core pornography from the ACT.
On the matter of non-violent erotica, I would like to draw everyone's attention to the two volumes of the report of the Joint Select Committee on Video Material. At the conclusion of volume 1, page 302, are these comments:
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