Page 1748 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 18 August 1992
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It has been put to me, Madam Speaker - and I think Ms Szuty made this comment in the course of her remarks - that this material should be removed from public exposure because it offends the sensibilities of women and children in our community. Frankly, Madam Speaker, I disagree. I believe that this material should be restricted not so much because of its impact on women and children but because of its impact on men, in particular, young men, whose attitude towards women is formed in part by the sorts of images of women they see around them in the community. Their perception of women is, I believe, affected by constant exposure to this kind of publication and these sorts of images. These sorts of publications, I believe, are an integral part of the process which breeds in our community a series of phenomena ranging from sexism, perhaps, at the one extreme to domestic violence and worse crimes at the other. Those sorts of things go hand in hand.
We have talked in this Assembly before about the persuasive power of the image. The Minister for Health, for example, has spoken at length about the powerful effect on young people of advertising of tobacco products at sporting events. We concede that point; it is very true. If the sorts of images used to advertise a brand of cigarettes make an impact on young people, what sort of impact do magazines of this kind have on those same young people? It clearly must be of a similar or greater order.
Mr Berry: Come on, Gary!
MR HUMPHRIES: Not at all. I have said before in this place that the power of these sorts of images is very great and we should not be denigrating or underestimating the extent to which they affect people's perceptions and their attitudes.
There are problems legally with this question of how to do something about putting them in the same category as materials that are classified X by the Commonwealth. Certainly, I acknowledge the argument put forward by the Attorney-General that the Commonwealth's reserve of the power to classify material in the ACT greatly retards our capacity to do the same thing; but we have to look at other ways of overcoming those problems - and there are other ways, I believe. I am not aware, for example, of whether the Government, through the Attorney or somebody else, has taken the step of approaching newsagents in this Territory to talk to them about the question of how they might voluntarily prevent these materials being put on public exposure. Maybe the Minister has had those discussions; maybe he has not. Again, I say: Where is the concern about this issue? It has not manifested itself until now and I think it is about time it should.
I do not believe that we should do as they have done, for example, in Western Australia and expect newsagents to be censors of themselves, deciding in fact what is of prurient interest to a child and what is not. That clearly is not acceptable. We cannot put newsagents and other retailers in those sorts of positions. We can expect the Government to set some kind of lead, if not through the sort of implicit threat put on petrol station owners about petrol pricing, then through some other method of persuasion which will get the job done. Frankly, I believe that this Government has so far sat on its hands about this issue, and it is about time it started to move.
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