Page 3167 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 18 November 1992
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The obligations of operators of brothels and escort agencies will include an obligation to take reasonable steps to ensure that persons infected with a sexually transmitted disease, an STD, do not work in the operator's business. This replaces a provision in the Bill, clause 12, which seeks to achieve a similar result in an indirect and, in the Government's view, impractical way. We also propose to insert a new clause, clause 12A, imposing a safe sex obligation on individuals, clients and prostitutes because we believe that it is not only incumbent upon operators to have some responsibility in this area but also a matter ultimately of personal responsibility.
Madam Speaker, as a result of the round table discussions involving both the Opposition and the Independents, we have expanded that to make it clear that these safe sex requirements apply to commercial sexual activity, whether in a brothel or otherwise. We make it clear that those public health safeguards apply whether the sexual activity occurs in a brothel as defined in the Act or from an escort agency or in any other circumstances. We want to be as broad-ranging as possible in that safe sex requirement.
Madam Speaker, some people will object that such a personal obligation is unenforceable. Such an objection can be made about many criminal offences that already exist; but that does not stop evidence of non-compliance from coming to light through complaints and information made available to the police, and I am confident that the same will apply to this matter. Such an objection is also one which underestimates the symbolic and educative role of the law. We do not all obey the law merely for fear of being caught by the police. The fact that the parliament has seen fit to prohibit certain conduct is an important signal to individual members of the community that the community as a whole strongly disapproves of that conduct. The vast bulk of the community obeys the law voluntarily because of a recognition of the community's attitude to conduct prohibited by the law.
Madam Speaker, we also propose to remove the clear inconsistency which exists between clauses 12 and 13 of the Prostitution Bill. In the former clause a brothel or escort agency operator is obliged to take steps to ensure that STD infected people do not work on the premises, and in the latter the operator or a prostitute may be committing an offence by using the result of a medical examination to indicate a worker's health status. We also have included amendments to ensure that only qualified medical practitioners nominated by the Chief Medical Officer of the Health Department are able to operate in this field.
Madam Speaker, we have modified the Prostitution Bill's provision on controlling the location of brothels in two limited respects. We have provided for the permitted locations to be designated by regulation, rather than name them in the Bill. This means that changes will be simpler to make, but it retains the important opportunity for the Assembly to scrutinise and disallow the changes. Secondly, we do not require escort agencies to be in these permitted locations. What is the point of requiring a telephone answering service - perhaps, in many cases, merely a telephone answering machine - to be located in Fyshwick? Mr Moore's Bill would require an escort agency to do so by virtue of clauses 3 and 5.
The Government's position on the location of brothels remains the same, basically, as that in the Bill and as stated in the discussion paper. They should be confined to the localities where they are at present, that is, Fyshwick and Mitchell. We believe that in the longer term we will have to look at other areas, if only for the reason that in the longer term limiting the permitted locations to only those
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