Page 3419 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 18 September 1991
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Mr Kaine indicated that X-rated videos are harmful to some members in our society. I had one personal experience as a prosecutor, where X-rated videos were used by a defendant who was convicted of incest on his then 15-year-old daughter, although the incest had been continuing for some two years. Certainly, that was an instance where X-rated videos were quite wrongly used by a member of society.
I would also like to talk briefly about the last part of the Liberal Party policy relating to excessively violent material. Dr Kinloch mentioned film classifications. I have also had a fair amount of experience in relation to persons who have been badly affected by excessively violent films. In terms of what has come before the courts in the ACT, there are a lot more instances of persons being affected by excessively violent films than one finds in relation to X-rated videos, although I do stress that incest case, because that was a clear case of X-rated videos. I was involved in a couple of cases where persons actually ran amuck after watching excessively violent videos. I think it is important for the Commonwealth, and indeed for all States, to review film classifications and also to ban excessively violent films.
MR BERRY (Minister for Health and Minister for Sport) (10.42): I rise to speak on this issue out of a deep concern for the motives with which Mr Stevenson has chosen to move this legislation. In examining whether or not we support this legislation, we also have to examine what Mr Stevenson's position has been in relation to issues he has chosen to run. We have heard about fluoride and guns and voters' veto and surveying community attitudes and pornographic violence, all of which have nothing to do with X-rated videos, I have to say. We know that the X-rating is applied somewhere else, and it is not about pornographic violence, it is about X-rated films.
We get some hints of where Mr Stevenson is coming from from his attacks on members of the Jewish community, under parliamentary privilege and under the guise of a debate on pornographic violence. We have heard some opposition to the United Nations, particularly in relation to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. That raises heaps of questions, in my view, about the position Mr Stevenson has taken. For example, a matter of some significant concern to me, and I would like him to address it, is where he stands on the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust. Did it happen? What does he do when he is in the deep north of Queensland? Is he crusading on X-rated videos? Is he campaigning to ensure that this sort of legislation has the endorsement of people in Queensland?
These are the sorts of things we have to examine when we consider what we do with legislation proposed by Mr Stevenson. We have to ask ourselves the question: How genuine is his approach? I do not think it is genuine at all. This is not about all the things Mr Stevenson says in
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