Page 3442 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 18 September 1991
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There are 17 of us here and 17 free-minded citizens can vote on it. But the pressures have come back to me. I will respond to the challenge and in a moment detail what I believe we can do about it in this house.
On the advice available to me at the time, an estimated 75 per cent of the sale and distribution of X-rated videos was for interstate sale and overseas trade, sadly, by mail order from the ACT. Some 15 per cent of over-the-counter sales in the ACT is wholesale trade, presumably for interstate traders. How do you like that? Some 15 per cent of this stuff goes to traders in the other States, not to individual recipients; so there must be clearing houses which are proscribed by the laws of those other States.
I recall that there was a large factory in Narrabeen, but the prosecution failed because the magistrate accepted that he could not be reasonably satisfied that the original tapes did not come from the ACT. So, there is a problem of proof, I concede. I make the point that the vast resources necessary to attend to legal challenges are available in that industry. The remaining 10 per cent of the trade is local in this Territory.
We must recognise the freedom of interstate trade provided in our self-government Act - section 69, I believe, which replicates, as Mr Connolly well knows, section 92 of the Constitution. Framing regulatory measures for any government law office in this Territory is a nightmare and wellnigh an impossibility. If the constitutional advice to me is correct, it is an impossibility within the framework that Mr Stevenson seeks.
Just prior to self-government the Commonwealth amended legislation to create a classification system in the Territory under the Classification of Publications Ordinance 1983. It is commonly believed that that is our ordinance. It is not; it remains under the control of the Commonwealth as an ACT ordinance. It was amended essentially to confine its provisions to classification matters in conjunction with the making of the Publications Control Ordinance, now an Act.
The Publications Control Act 1989 has been the subject of two private member's Bills by Mr Stevenson, and we are looking at the latter of the two. The Film Classification Act in the ACT relies upon the operation of classification exemptions under the corresponding New South Wales State law, and specifies that only classified films, G to R, with prescribed markings and subject to relevant restrictions, can be exhibited to the public. I reject completely the unnecessary attack in a debate on that Act on my colleague Dr Kinloch in relation to some suggestion that he was privy to matters which he does not condone.
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