Page 3171 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 18 November 1992
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MR HUMPHRIES (11.19): Madam Speaker, I rise also to support the Bill before the house today, together with the amendments which are a product of discussions between members of the Assembly. The debate today is in some senses an occasion for a mixture of pleasure and disappointment. The pleasure comes firstly from the fact that finally the Assembly will be able to deal legislatively with the matter of prostitution, which has been around for quite some time and has caused some debate in the community. It is time that that community debate was brought to a head. Today's legislation, when it passes, I believe, will be a good way of doing that.
I endorse the comments made by Mr Connolly, Ms Szuty and others that this legislation puts in place an effective regime which will be a model for other jurisdictions to follow. It deals with the matter in a workable way by establishing a robust and realistic scheme for the regulation of prostitution in the ACT. Having carefully examined this legislation over a period of months, I believe that it will provide for a check on damage which might be done within the industry to individuals, particularly the health of individuals. I endorse the comment that this legislation should be emulated in due course by other States, particularly those that have attempted other forms of regulation with varying degrees of success.
This is also an occasion for some disappointment. It is unfortunate that legislation is necessary to regulate an industry of this kind in the Federal capital. Prostitution is an activity which many of us have much cause to regret. It is possible, obviously, to do certain things in relation to the way in which it might operate in the Territory or indeed anywhere else, but it is not possible to legislate it out of existence. It can and will exist irrespective of what law makers or law enforcers happen to decide about it. The evidence for that statement is the many attempts made historically to ban prostitution in a variety of societies, all of which, to the best of my observation, have been entirely unsuccessful.
Today is not a day to moralise about prostitution, but rather a day to act on the question of prostitution, to protect those who are, for whatever reason, caught up in the industry. It is a day to put aside also the potential to make political capital out of an initiative which has been taken by the crossbenchers and which, in other jurisdictions, has so easily been the subject of intense political point scoring. We do the citizens of the Territory a service by putting those considerations aside and proceeding to enact legislation which we believe will effectively deal with the problems in this industry.
I want to refer briefly to some of the strengths I see in the legislation as now amended. Madam Speaker, the legislation now widens the scope of control over the activities of prostitution. This is not merely a Bill about brothels, which I think it could reasonably be said was the scope of an earlier version of the Bill. It is now very much a Bill about prostitution. It applies in most respects to both escort agencies and individual prostitution. Here I refer particularly to the important provisions dealing with the knowing infection of another person with a sexually transmittable disease, to provisions dealing with the use of prophylactics in a brothel or elsewhere and to the restrictions on child prostitution. All of those things apply equally, irrespective of where the activity takes place. That is a very important consideration in making this an effective piece of legislation.
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