Page 1239 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 24 April 1990
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MR PROWSE: Can young people watch this tripe? I will repeat it until I get some quiet. We believe that young people cannot watch this, that it is not available to them. We have been told that it is not available to them. In our vicinity is a well-respected senior teacher at a Catholic school. He went on a camp recently with young people of around 15 years of age. Around the camp fire it was pointed out to him that the 15-year-olds are having movie nights. Parents go out; there are pool parties; a few videos are put on, and it turns out that they are bringing in porn movies. I did not know that, and I was shattered to hear it.
I warn everybody in our society to check with the parents of the people with whom your children are going to watch movies, have a nice night out, a sleep-in or what have you, what sort of movies are to be shown. The parents do not know, I can tell you, but if they are not going to be home they will never know. This is happening. This pornography is being displayed on videos to children as young as 12 years of age in our society, and we do not know it. As caring parents we should be warned of it.
Dr Kinloch has already mentioned a literary masterpiece. We have all seen it; it is the People magazine. I purchased this because I saw it blown up to four times the normal size as a banner outside a newsagency to attract people to buy it. This was opposite the Scullin Primary School, where the kids go across for their lunch, et cetera. This has an inducement to young people to become interested in what is pornography, because the first thing that it says is, "E Street star in porno movie". I think that is directed at the young teenage element in our society. It gets better. Further down it says, "Madonna's thug brother is into drugging, bashing, shooting and dog sex". This was outside a primary school in full colour.
Mr Moore: It is irrelevant; it is already banned.
MR PROWSE: It is irrelevant! We hear it again from the narrow-minded member opposite. On numerous pages - about 99 per cent - it tells us that we can buy all these wondrous things from the ACT. The porn capital of South East Asia is the ACT. There are several entries in here from other States. We will probably hear from learned members tonight that if it is shown in other States it must be all right; therefore why should we ban it? Absolute rubbish!
We can go on to other aspects of this. The situation, we have been told, is that if you ban it, it will go underground and it will increase usage. What a load of codswallop! There are examples of the use of alcohol increasing in some areas when it has been banned, but you could not expect that if you ban pornography - in particular, the non-violent erotica movies - there will be an increase in sales. It is so freely available now that I doubt that it is at all possible. It is already
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