Page 4852 - Week 16 - Monday, 25 November 1991
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If we, as members, reflect on this whole debate in relation to the health issues that come before us, we realise that it is very important that we move forward in law reform. Most people who have spoken to date have expressed their concerns in relation to that issue. That is the very significant one. I think it is high time that we talked about reform in this area. It has been out in the public arena for quite some time, during the life of the committee. Many people have come before us, including representatives of both the Anglican and Catholic churches, indicating their support for law reform. I think it is appropriate that this Bill be supported at this time. As I said, I will move some amendments, and I am sure that others will as well. Nevertheless, I think it deserves support.
MR STEVENSON (5.24): A professor of psychology, Dr John Court, wrote, this month, an article called, "Prostitution and the Cycle of Abuse". He wrote:
For many years Australia's laws dealing with prostitution have been modelled on the 1949 United Nations Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others. The emphasis of Australian laws has been to prohibit:
having sexual intercourse with a person under the age of consent,
... ... ...
exploiting for a profit the prostitution of another person, and
offending the public through soliciting for the purpose of prostitution.
However, in 1986 the Victorian government passed the Prostitution Regulation Act which abandoned former controls and allowed licensed brothels to operate.
Dr Court continued:
Of course, advocates of changes in the laws on prostitution come at the issues quite differently. How are we to manage something that is going to happen anyway? Surely it is better to have things out in the open and legal than driven underground and criminal. Prostitution has always been around and laws against it solve nothing. What right have we to interfere in adults' personal choices? By legalising, we can control problems of sexually transmitted diseases. And then as a backdrop, the Kinseyan response is that prostitution is a victimless crime.
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