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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 3 Hansard (10 April) . . Page.. 845 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General) (11.06): Mr Speaker, I present the Prostitution (Amendment) Bill 1997, together with its explanatory memorandum.

Title read by Clerk.

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, I move:

That this Bill be agreed to in principle.

The principal purpose of this Bill is to oblige brothel and escort agency operators to provide updated information to the Registrar of Brothels and Escort Agencies annually. As some members will recall, the decriminalisation of prostitution in the ACT was recommended in 1991 in the interim report of the ACT Legislative Assembly Select Committee on HIV, Illegal Drugs and Prostitution. In 1992 the chair of that committee, Mr Moore, introduced two Bills into the Assembly - the Prostitution Bill 1992 and the Prostitution (Consequential Amendments) Bill 1992. Some of us here were involved in round table bilateral discussions about these Bills before they were debated in the Assembly. I should say multilateral discussions, really. As a result, the Bills were amended on the floor and were passed by the Assembly.

One of the concerns about the sex industry which were raised while we were considering its decriminalisation was the public perception that the prostitution industry traditionally has been controlled by criminal syndicates and is associated with other illegal activities. To address the issue of criminal infiltration, the Act provided that there would be a register of brothels and escort agencies. The information which is placed on the register concerns the locations and addresses of brothels and escort agencies and the names and residential addresses of owners and operators of the businesses. In the case where a company owns a business the register should contain the name and residential address of each director and shareholder of that business.

The purpose of the register, then, is to create a public record regarding the ACT's sex industry and to make the industry open and aboveboard, so that any criminal infiltration of the industry can be detected. This approach was seen as imposing minimal resource requirements on government and operators. It is not a licensing system because, although there are penalties for not providing information for the register, the business itself is not rendered illegal by failure to provide that information.

The amendments before the Assembly today essentially involve some finetuning of the register and requirements to provide information for inclusion on it. Currently, although there is a requirement under the Act to provide notice to the Registrar of Brothels and Escort Agencies where the information on the register needs to be changed, I am advised by the registrar that the level of compliance has been disappointing. Because information has not been kept up to date by operators in the sex industry, inaccuracies on the register have resulted.

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