Page 5034 - Week 16 - Wednesday, 27 November 1991
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Mr Speaker, I give another example of our concerns. The Prostitution Bill creates offences relating to unsafe sex practices in brothels, such as knowingly infecting another person with a sexually transmitted disease or failing to use condoms. There are potential problems arising from such a move. For example, such offences may give rise to a flood of criminal injury compensation claims. There are likely to be problems of proof. Such provisions may prove to be difficult, if not impossible, to enforce. I repeat that the Government does not believe that it can responsibly give support to the laws proposed in the Prostitution Bill, because we believe that we do not yet have enough information to fully address the issue involved, and the report does not give us that information.
Mr Speaker, I wish to alert the Assembly to another legal issue which I do not think the report has covered at all but which probably does need to be addressed. That issue is the legal classification of prostitutes. The Bill simply seems to assume that they will be employees, but that merely glosses over a fairly difficult issue. It appears that there is a wide range of practices and approaches in the industry and that many prostitutes may be in the nature more of independent contractors rather than employees. My department advises me that there are indications that significant sections of the industry would resist classification as employees. This classification issue is not merely a legal technicality. It has significant implications for the purposes of workers' compensation, insurance and taxation.
Mr Speaker, the position that Mr Berry stated the other day is essentially still the Government's position. While we think that it is appropriate to move for reform in this area and while clearly the prohibitory approach that the law has somewhat hypocritically taken for thousands of years is inappropriate, we do not think we are in a position yet to support this Bill. Although a decision in principle has been made to support law reform and no longer to deal with prostitution as an offence per se, we do not think that sufficient attention has been given to the appropriate legal regime that ought to be adopted.
Our favoured position would be to adjourn debate on this Bill and to let a body such as the Community Law Reform Committee focus on a legislative model that might be appropriate for the ACT, given a decision to move for decriminalisation. In effect, we are issuing a word of caution. Let us not proceed on this Bill and the flood of amendments that seem to be circulating. It is an important issue. Let us get the community, through the Community Law Reform Committee process, to look at the best legal regime to achieve the goal, given that we seem to have broad agreement that prostitution as an offence per se should not remain the law. There ought to be reform, but let us give more attention to the detail of the reform.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .