Page 3684 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 9 December 1992
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Madam Speaker, in relation to the question of banning X-rated videos, non-violent erotica, there is a very simple issue which Mr Stevenson addressed last night and which I believe puts paid to his arguments that we would drive it underground. That, in fact, is what Mr Stevenson's Bill would do in relation specifically to X-rated videos. It is far better, in my view, to have those issues being addressed through education and through information than it is to drive them underground, and that, quite frankly, would be the simple effect of the Bill proposed by Mr Stevenson.
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (11.06): Madam Speaker, I support Mr Stevenson's Bill, as I have supported the principle of banning this kind of material in all of the years that I have been a member of this Assembly and its preceding bodies, going back to 1974. I think the facts speak for themselves. With recent action taken by the Northern Territory to ban this material, the ACT is now the only political entity in Australia that permits this kind of material to be produced and distributed here. Not only is it produced and distributed in the ACT; as has been pointed out many times before, it also is being distributed right across the length and breadth of the country into States where currently there are laws prohibiting it.
We are setting ourselves aside as some sort of special community in which this kind of material is okay when it is not okay anywhere else in Australia. To take that view, one has to ask what makes the people of Canberra so different. I do not see anything that is so different about the people that I know in Canberra as compared to the people that I know elsewhere in Australia, and I know a great many people. I see no difference. Yet political bodies across the length and breadth of this country, except here, have taken steps to ban this material. So I repeat: What is so different about us that we are not affected by this kind of material? The answer is that there is no difference.
Wise people across the length and breadth of the country have made the decision that this material is unacceptable. We have the same duty to our community as those people elsewhere have to theirs. But I think that it goes further. In the past we have been able to hide behind the fact that if we ban them here they can always go to the Northern Territory. Well, they tried that. They did go to the Northern Territory when we, the Alliance Government, imposed such a heavy tax on them. They asked to be taxed. They asked to be taxed because they thought that that would legitimise the business. We accommodated them, Madam Speaker, and we did tax them. Then they discovered that they did not like that. They complained that they were being singled out for special treatment, as indeed they were, because in the old Assembly, as in this one, we could not get the numbers to ban this material.
We took other steps and the industry began to migrate. You have been listening to them scream over recent months about the dreadful impositions that this Government put on them. It is very interesting. Since they could not even operate anywhere else in Australia except the Northern Territory, they went there. What did the Northern Territory Government do? The Northern Territory Government did what this Government ought to do. It said, "We do not want this material in our Territory either, and Darwin is not going to be the porn capital of Australia". So, they took steps to stop it.
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