Page 1235 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 24 April 1990
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We, the majority of the committee -
this is not a minority report; this is a majority of the committee -
strongly oppose that proposition.
That is, a proposition to have the category of non-violent erotica.
It would entrench X-rated video pornography, described officially as hard-core pornography in the report, in the community under the guise of the misleading title of NVE. The proposal runs counter to the overwhelming burden of evidence submitted to the Committee concerning the harmful effects of this material and is inconsistent with the findings of the Committee thereon. (See Chapter 13).
I commend chapter 13 to all members of the Assembly, to all who care about evidence brought forward in our parliament about this subject.
So that is why we are gathered here tonight - to ask ourselves whether we, on behalf of the people of the ACT, are prepared to say to the rest of Australia, "You have got it wrong; you should not have drawn the lines where you did. We know better than you; we are going to insist that your governments, acting on behalf of your citizens, should not be allowed to maintain your standards of family and personal values". At the moment we are saying to New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania and South Australia that we believe that the people of the national capital of Australia are better judges of what is right and wrong for those States than the legislatures of those States. At the moment we are prepared to violate the laws of the rest of Australia in pursuit of our own selfish economic interests, interests which are in themselves debasing and degrading of our own society.
I now therefore give my fundamental objection to the maintenance of the hard-core pornographic industry - do not call it the NVE industry - in this capital city. It is that we are not only accepting base standards for ourselves but we are also the agents of the promotion of those values throughout a nation which needs to see its capital city as, above all, a place of honour, virtue and integrity, a place suitable for the conduct of the nation's government.
Here we are, the 17 representatives of the people of that city, with the responsibility for a decision affecting the perceptions of all Australians of what our society stands for. I now turn to some evidence of the way we are seen outside our own city. I begin with an extract from a letter from John Dowd, Attorney-General of the State of New South Wales. He said:
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