Page 1279 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 24 April 1990
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per 100,000, but then we had some changes and it started to increase - 1970, Don Chipp; 1973, Murphy; 1975, Sexual Assault Report Centre opened; 1976, the Commonwealth Literature Review Board was abolished. In 1983 - that is when it started to grow like the national debt, straight up - we had the massive release of pornography under rulings of the Federal and State ALP governments.
These are the statistics. Why do people not actually look at the statistics? If you are going to vote against an issue that is as important as this you cannot just skim over some of the nonsense that is presented to you by people like those in the porn industry. They have a vested interest. You have to do your homework. They would not debate when the public debate was on because they knew what would happen to them. There was a public debate which members of the general public attended. It is interesting that at the public debate at the Australian National University they said it was a lineball and that the anti-video people just lost it. Who were the people voting? They were first-year students. If we can get a lineball with first-year students what would happen with another debate, as at the Albert Hall? It was absolutely overwhelming.
Let us look at some other examples, none of which are anecdotal, as Mr Moore and Mr Duby mentioned a number of times. I can give you dozens and dozens of anecdotal examples. You may not feel that is valid, but the Speaker does, and with good reason. Ask the victims of crime whether anecdotal evidence is valuable and see what they say.
An article headed "Man seduced girls with blue movies" reports that David Hill, a divorcee, seduced young schoolgirls with marijuana and blue movies. As was reported in May 1989, Justice Sir William Kearney, in the Supreme Court in Darwin, said society needed protecting from such stimulants. He said:
People who think there is no connection between pornography and the violent and bizarre crimes that come before the courts ought to do some studies.
He was complaining about the X-rated videos available in the Northern Territory. A crown prosecutor in Victoria - the members have seen this data, because it has been sent to them - Richard Read, who has been the prosecutor for dozens and dozens of rape cases, said that the people who have to deal with these cases know full well that what we see influences what we do.
You do not need to go to the studies. Why do you need to wonder whether looking at muck is going to affect the way we feel? Do people not have an understanding of why hundreds of millions of dollars in Australia alone are spent each year on advertising on television? The reason
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