Page 1744 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 18 August 1992
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magazines like Playboy and material beyond that, which used to be very prominently displayed as you go into a petrol station, now tend to be on blinder racks well towards the rear of the stations in a large number of cases. So there has been movement that way.
I think we have to take a long-term view in relation to how community expectations of this sort of material have changed. A decade ago, every afternoon newspaper - admittedly, there are not so many of them around these days - seemed to think that it was necessary to have an unclad woman on page 3. The tabloid press throughout Australia no longer do that. Again about a decade or so ago, it seemed de rigueur in summer that the person who gave the weather forecast would be a young woman who would appear in some sort of scanty attire. That seemed to be the case during the summer. Again, public opinion has been raised and that sort of thing these days would not be tolerated. It is intriguing, though, that at the same time that this sort of publication has become rather more fashionable, or rather more in circulation, we are also seeing on commercial television - and, indeed, the ABC - a whole range of documentaries which would suggest that sex has only just been discovered and is something that commercial television needs to educate the community about.
I was particularly intrigued to read a feature in the Canberra Times last Sunday about the intriguing result of those sorts of shows. I refer, in particular, to the Sophie Lee so-called documentary. Now that commercial television stations are using people meters for their rating systems, as opposed to the old diary system, they are noticing a remarkable difference. With the old diary rating system, very few people would acknowledge that they actually watched such rubbish, so such shows rated fairly low. But with the people meter, lo and behold, the result is different. A large number of people would write in their diaries that they were watching something edifying on the ABC, SBS or another channel, but in fact they were glued to Sophie Lee.
Clearly, we have a bit further to go in educating the community about appropriate use of sexual imagery. Of course, one of the most important aspects of that is educating the community and reforming the law and practice in relation to the role and status of women, because in a society that was truly equal - and that is the vision of society that certainly we on the Labor side of the house share, and I am sure it would be the vision of society that Ms Szuty and Mr Moore would share - one would hope that there simply would not be a demand for this sort of material and, as attitudes to that change, so this material goes out of vogue.
I recently went around quite a lot of the industrial workshops within ACTION, which is one of the ACT's main sources of industrial style employment - the heavy vehicle workshops and the like. You do not see, scattered around the walls, the girlie magazines or the girlie posters that were once almost expected to be seen in a motor vehicle workshop. I think that is essentially because a lot of work was done through the unions, in the public sector, in particular, about the appropriate and inappropriate use of calendar girls and pin-ups in the workplace. Unfortunately, I suspect, the private sector is lagging somewhat on that, and one can visit private sector workshops around this town and elsewhere and still see that type of thing - without mentioning any particular workshops. But attitudes are changing and what was once the norm now strikes one as being almost the exception. Again, education and changes in attitudes are the best way to resolve the matter.
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