Page 1274 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 24 April 1990
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constantly misrepresent them. The video that was sent to the 13-year-old girl showed someone being chained up, simulated whippings and so on. Its title was Dungeon of Pain; that has an X classification. I talk about only those within the X classification.
McGaugh, a psychologist at the University of California, in his research on memory entitled "Preserving the presence of the past", in the American Psychologist of February 1983, stated:
Powerful sexually arousing memories of experiences from the past keep intruding themselves back onto the mind's memory screen serving to stimulate and erotically arouse the viewer.
Let me put that more simply: that picture that I showed you can be restimulated at any time that there is a suggestion of something like it. If I tell you now not to get a picture of the image that I showed you, you will have a graphic demonstration of the fact that we have no control over the image because that is exactly what you got.
Do we want to fill the heads of people in Australia with pornographic images? Let me tell you that a simple photograph is nothing compared with an X-rated video. You will have that image with you for the rest of your lives. When people view pornography it can be restimulated, not by other pornography but simply by looking at a woman. That woman may be a mother, sister, daughter or any other woman. You will experience this again; you have in the past. We all know this; that is what is happening. It does not make us feel good about these things, but they happen. That is what we put into our minds.
Where did pornography in Australia come from? It is interesting that up to 1970 there was very little hard-core pornography in Australia. In 1970 Don Chipp opened the door a little to pornography and in 1972 Lionel Murphy took the door off its hinges.
Let me tell you what was going on when that happened. The report of the Joint Select Committee on Video Material, volume 1, April 1988, talks of a document entitled "Censorship Policy" which is attached to a minute dated 30 May 1973 to the then Attorney-General from his department. What did it say about pornography? This was from someone in the department, who stated:
It is considered that almost all the States would be hostile to a policy which could lead to the circulation of so-called hard core pornography ...
Indeed they are; every one of them has shown that by banning it. But why is the Federal Government talking about introducing pornography when it knows that all the States in Australia do not want it? The report states:
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