Page 3685 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 9 December 1992
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Mr Connolly: They banned duplication only.
MR KAINE: They have taken steps to stop it. What have we done to stop it? Mr Connolly can look indignant. What has Mr Connolly, as Attorney-General of this Territory, done to stop it? Absolutely nothing. He is going to get up in a minute - I can see it now - and he is going to defend the situation. He is wrong. This Government is wrong.
It is about time that the members of this Government began to accept some responsibility for the moral standards of this Territory. Morality, according to this Government, has gone out the window. There is none. We have no moral standards on abortion; we have no moral standards on drugs; we have no moral standards on pornography. The list is endless. There is the Government that takes this stance; there they sit. They will not, on any occasion, stand up and defend the family. They will not defend any decent standard of community behaviour. They constantly pick, pick, pick away at community standards - reduce them, reduce them, reduce them, reduce them. Not one of them, on the face of it - they may do it in the caucus, but they do not dare do it out here because they will be held to account for it - stands up once and says, as Kennedy said on a very famous occasion in the United States, "We will not take one more step back". It is about time they did.
This matter has been debated in this house and its predecessor many times; yet somehow we have this mistaken view, as I said before, that we are different from the rest of Australia; that we can tolerate this material and it does us no harm. That is not so. I ask the members of the Government opposite to vote on this matter as individuals. I challenge them to vote on the basis of their conscience, not on the basis of what the caucus directs them to do, not on the basis of what the Socialist Left of the Labor Party tells them to do. Let us see you stand up and vote as a matter of conscience. I will guarantee to you, Madam Speaker, that if they do this legislation will go through today.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (11.12): Madam Speaker, Mr Stevenson has convinced me with some words that he uttered in the Assembly recently. He has convinced me, as he said yesterday, that when you have an evil or an unpleasantness the way to deal with it is not to ban it; the way to deal with it is to meet evil ideas openly. As Mr Stevenson said yesterday, if you ban an evil idea you just send it underground and it mutates into even more evil forms. That is what Mr Stevenson said yesterday when he said, "You should not pass laws against racist material". Mr Stevenson said that the most important thing is freedom of expression, and if you pass laws against an evil thing, which I think he conceded racism was, it can just mutate underground. It is better to deal with it in the open; it is better, Mr Stevenson said, to beat a bad idea with a good idea. Madam Speaker, as I said, that convinced me. That is the basic fallacy in the line that is being pedalled by Mr Stevenson.
Madam Speaker, we have no time for the X-rated video industry. We see no merit in this material. But we do see that it is safer to have it controlled, to have it tightly policed, rather than to encourage the illegal black market in pornography. There is no doubt that if you go into any area in Sydney or Melbourne, if you know where to go, you can buy unclassified material - material that has not been through the very rigorous standards of censorship. We in the ACT take our responsibility for enforcing the laws in relation to X-rated videos quite seriously.
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