Page 721 - Week 02 - Thursday, 23 February 2012
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The committee has made 17 recommendations. I dissent from recommendations 1, 2, 3, 6, 13 and 14. Recommendation 4 goes to one of the issues that are a problem and became obvious as a problem back in 2008 when it became clear that there had been no inspections of brothels by the Office of Regulatory Services for upwards of five years. The recommendation states:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government develop a protocol for inspections of brothels, to be reported against in each Justice and Community Safety Directorate Annual Report.
Further, the committee made the very strong recommendation—and this is probably the most important recommendation that comes from the inquiry from my point of view, as the single biggest impetus for this inquiry was dealing with the issue of underage people in brothels—that the current section 20 of the Prostitution Act should apply to children and young people up to the age of 18 years and it should become an absolute liability offence. Currently there are a range of offences for having underage children on premises and it becomes a decreasingly severe offence closer to the age of 18. It was the unanimous view of the committee that having underage children working in brothels, providing sexual services in brothels, is abhorrent and does not meet community standards. We do not believe that there should be an excuse for these things.
Recommendation 7 relates to the provision of prophylactics and other safety equipment. The committee unanimously took the view that in other workplaces it is the responsibility of employers to provide safety equipment and it should be the responsibility of the brothel owners to do the same.
There was considerable discussion and some dissent about the role of police powers, which I shall address in my dissenting comments. The committee has asked the ACT government and ACT Policing in recommendation 8 to have an appropriate level of focus and resourcing on the observation of organised crime that is associated with the sex industry.
There are a number of recommendations which are unanimous in relation to trafficking and freedom of movement. Although I agree with these recommendations, I believe that we probably should have gone further in this area. It is disappointing to me that members of the committee sought to downplay the issue of trafficking. I suppose this is an area which has been one of the themes of my role as a parliamentarian. I have been involved in policy development and in conversation and discussion on these issues not just in Australia but in many countries in the Western world and I believe it is not something that should be downplayed.
There are some recommendations at the end of the report that go to protect the privacy of people who are registered on the register held with the Office of Regulatory Services. Some of those recommendations would be rather watered down by some of the recommendations that I have dissented from. The majority of the committee thinks that we should have a more lenient approach where more people would be exempted from registration.
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