Page 3432 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 18 September 1991
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Some simple human behaviour can be explained by simple Pavlovian conditioning, but rape is not simple behaviour; it has inputs from right across the continuum of indirectness. The effects of pornography are extremely complex, but they do not include rape and they are not such as to justify censorship.
I believe that. People do not go out and rape and commit violence just because they are watching X-rated videos, especially taking into consideration that X-rated videos do not have violence in them.
Mr Stevenson has submitted a lot of information and spoken about the illegal activities within and behind the X-rated industry. If those allegations are true and warrant investigation, I have no problem with that and I fully support such an investigation; but I do not accept that the banning of X-rated videos is an appropriate way of dealing with that illegal behaviour behind the scenes. They are two separate issues. If there is illegal behaviour behind the industry, it needs to be looked at. The regulations and guidelines with regard to the licensing of X-rated video companies and the companies behind them need to be looked at. Banning X-rated videos is not the way to deal with the problem of illegal management of business.
I conclude by saying that 90 per cent of the calls I have received on X-rated videos have been with regard to violence; 90 per cent of them were interested in stopping violence. We need to look at the violence content of our videos and what is shown on television. I believe that the community is confused by the classifications of the videos in that they see X-rated as being highly restricted whereas R-rated is not, and therefore X-rated must be a lot worse than R-rated. The Assembly and the Government need to push the Commonwealth Chief Censor. I seek leave to table a letter I wrote to Mr Duffy, the Attorney-General, about six weeks ago with regard to the R-rated classification.
Leave granted.
MR MOORE (11.30): It gives me pleasure to follow a very enlightening speech by Ms Maher. One of the strongest supports for her argument comes from Violence - Directions for Australia from the National Committee on Violence, the committee chaired by Professor Duncan Chappell of the Australian Institute of Criminology. I have raised this issue before, and I think it is appropriate to include a few words from that report about the impact of the sorts of things Ms Maher was talking about, that is, the denigration of women and sexism, because that is what some of Ms Maher's debate concentrated on. The Committee on Violence argued:
The committee deplores sexism and the denigration of women. It feels, however, that values such as these, no less than other anti-social thoughts, are best combated not by censorship -
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