Page 2276 - Week 08 - Thursday, 7 June 1990
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and, given the fact that the house has in the past on a number of occasions expressed the clear wish that X-rated films should not be banned and prohibited and that undue censorship would not be tolerated here in the ACT, it would be an example of lack of integrity for the Chief Minister to take any other action or to exercise his considerable force of will and leadership qualities to browbeat the other members of his Alliance Government into supporting the Liberal philosophy of banning X-rated videos entirely. Instead, what he has done is to recognise the realities of the situation and the clear wish of the Assembly and, given the parlous financial state that the ACT has found itself in, he has done the only honourable thing and bowed to the wish of the Assembly and introduced revenue measures against the X-rated industry.
It should be pointed out that this Chief Minister was not prepared to bring in revenue measures against that industry - as Mr Stevenson so often likes to say, "legitimising an industry" which I would like to point out again is already a legitimate industry here in the ACT - until the Government had addressed the very issue which Mr Stevenson and others of his ilk have raised: the clearly expressed community wish that something be done about X-rated videos. For this reason the Alliance Government has introduced the Publications Control (Amendment) Bill, which in effect regulates the X-rated industry.
In a lot of ways I am absolutely fascinated by this. I cannot follow the logic in Mr Stevenson's motion for, if anything, the person who has indicated a lack of integrity, a lack of credibility, and extreme hypocrisy is no-one else but Mr Stevenson. Many times Mr Stevenson has extolled the supposedly dreadful system and the dreadful things that X-rated movies do to the community as a whole, yet here on Tuesday Mr Stevenson had an opportunity to join with this Government in closing down many of those very things that he finds objectionable in X-rated videos, the distribution of them, the hire of them and the provisions which allow unscrupulous people to hire X-rated videos and distribute them to 13-year-old girls.
These are the very provisions which you would expect Mr Stevenson to support. But he says that this industry, which he is so opposed to, has got to be freely available in the streets; freely available in every supermarket; freely available at petrol stations and the like. If Mr Stevenson is so concerned about the availability of these materials, why did he not join with the Government in regulating them and making them difficult to obtain for minors, ensuring that people were not receiving unsolicited advertising material in the mail - things which he claims are quite offensive? He did not join in doing that. It makes one wonder what the reason is behind that. I challenge Mr Stevenson to answer that. He did not answer that in the debate on Tuesday. I doubt whether he would be able to answer that challenge now, for the simple reason that we know what his aims in this are. He is using this
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