Page 1328 - Week 05 - Thursday, 25 June 1992
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We did not attempt to mislead Mr Connolly on this issue. At Mr Connolly's request we stated our case, which is that we wanted the ACT Legislative Assembly to enact Legislation restricting the display of soft-core magazines in Newsagents and other places so as to make these sexist images of women visually inaccessible to children.
Mr Connolly indicated in very strong terms that he would not support our call for such legislation.
We asked him if we could show him some of the covers of the magazines in question.
One member of our group brought out a plastic bag with material in it. Amongst the material was, in our opinion, a hard-core pornographic 6 page article contained in a magazine called Hustler, to which Mr Connolly referred.
Mr Connolly took the Hustler material without being invited to do so and proceeded to make an issue out of the material.
We assured Mr Connolly that this was not the subject of our lobby, and that we had not intended him to consider that material. We believe that we did not misrepresent the subject of our lobby to Mr Connolly.
If Mr Connolly formed the view that we were concerned with any material contained in those magazines, he obviously had not grasped the subject of our lobby. We explained to Mr Connolly that we had collected the material from another group with whom we are not affiliated, because we, quite frankly, refuse to buy any of this material as a matter of principle.
As many members of the Assembly are aware we are concerned with what children see on the front covers of magazines when they enter newsagencies and other retail premises.
We agree that we said "This is what we are talking about". At the time, we had extracted from the material a front cover of a soft-core magazine and had put it in front of Mr Connolly.
As to the rest of Mr Connolly's answer, it was not pertinent to the question asked. Our lobbying has been in respect of this very narrow issue. We are not affiliated with or involved with any anti-pornography group. Mr Connolly's comments in respect of the wider issue and the goings on in Canberra and/or Fyshwick are not our business or the subject of our lobby.
The rest of the meeting with Mr Connolly was directly on the subject of our lobby. We understood him to agree that these images of women are sexist and that sexism is not acceptable.
However, when challenged as to what he was prepared to do in respect of this particular matter, he had no answer.
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