Page 3433 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 18 September 1991
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in other words, not by the methodology that Dennis Stevenson is suggesting -
but by criticism, censure and stigmatisation in the marketplace of ideas.
That is the contribution Ms Maher has made today, and many of us have made it previously.
The association of violence with non-violent erotica is a methodology that has been used extensively by Mr Stevenson in his campaign to have X-rated movies debated. It is a great shame that Mr Stevenson and other members of the Assembly were not able to attend all of the national conference on the sex industry which was held in Canberra recently. Mr Stevenson attended only to speak, and his contribution was appreciated.
Also speaking was Professor Kutchinsky, whom Mr Stevenson has attempted to debunk here on a number of occasions. The responses to the debunking of Professor Kutchinsky were very enlightening. Speaker after speaker at the conference, from a whole range of perspectives, with the exception of Mr Stevenson and, as I remember, Senator Walters, who also spoke, was able to debunk the sort of statistical analysis that Mr Stevenson and Senator Walters put about the advent of erotica.
The statistics on rape and incest can be accounted for in many ways. Those statistics are not necessarily associated with the advent of erotica, and attempts to do so have been misleading in the extreme. I think many of you will remember that the Australian Institute of Criminology, just prior to the last time we had this debate, took Mr Stevenson to task for misusing the statistics they had presented on this issue. They made it quite clear that those statistics are not necessarily associated with non-violent erotica.
It is very important to understand that we are dealing with a series of films that do not have any violence at all associated with them. In fact, the X-rated classification means that there cannot even be coercion. In my discussions with the Chief Censor, he emphasised again and again that, if there is even the slightest emphasis on coercion, the movie is automatically removed. It is very important for us to consider just what it is that Mr Stevenson is trying to achieve and whether or not this methodology will achieve it.
Prohibition certainly appears to have the opposite effect from what it is trying to achieve, and we can see that quite specifically by reference to these sorts of movies. In New South Wales or Victoria, if you go into any of the obvious shops where you might be able to purchase these
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