Page 4841 - Week 16 - Monday, 25 November 1991
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central debate today is the appropriateness of Mr Moore's licensing system. I will come back to that. The Victorian situation, therefore, has gone back to relying upon the technicalities of local zoning and planning laws.
Returning to the summation by the Institute of Criminology, we must bear in mind, as we have to in other debates, the difference between legalisation and decriminalisation. Briefly, to decriminalise is to take away the offence and often to, in this context, leave the activity in some limbo land. To legalise is for an official stamp of approval to be given to the activity by the state, and it is that quantum leap that will, of course, be a part of the vexed issue before us during this debate. I read from paper No. 22, which I have identified already, these words:
Legalisation involves formal recognition and state sanctioning of the trade.
Mr Moore's Bill effectively provides for a state sanctioned activity through a registration board. In saying this, I acknowledge that the prostitutes collectives that I have spoken to recently, the one in Victoria notably, indicate that they would support - looking at my notes of the last conference - a mixture of decriminalisation with other controls, but they do not support legalisation. In fact, I was told that decriminalisation alone is very bad; that if we are going to take any steps - if we are going to bite the bullet in any way in this debate - we cannot simply decriminalise and walk away from it and hope that it will regulate itself; not with the HIV issue. So, quite properly, Mr Moore has looked towards a regulatory mechanism, and he proposes a board of a type.
I want to say that present at this conference were nuns and other community workers - people with a very wide and compassionate view of this industry. The view was that all the laws relating to street workers, escorts, vagrancy and consorting should be repealed; that is, control over these activities should not be by the police but should be by health and labour inspectors, and that offences for breaches of regulations would be offences under OH and S laws, not under criminal laws.
So, we are talking about laws relating to the non-use of condoms, for example. Also, the prostitutes collective very strongly recommended that there should be a further offence of removing or breaking a condom deliberately during service. As they said to me, that appears to have been a problem to them. Other offences should be ones relating to public health in an occupational safety sense - for example, here is someone risking a worker, and themselves, possibly.
In the Canberra context, it was also made clear to me by a spokeswoman here that the industry itself is very zealous, and very concerned about any sex worker who engages in unprotected services. There tends to be an ostracism process. This leads me to another recommendation of the
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