Page 724 - Week 02 - Thursday, 23 February 2012
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rigorous registration, which is a matter that I have dealt with in my dissenting comments.
The final issue I will touch on in the time I have available goes to a deep concern I have. While the committee believes that it is inappropriate for underage people to be active in the sex industry and work in the sex industry—and it is an offence under the current act to have minors, young children, on the premises even if they are not working—I suggested to members that that should be translated to sole operators working in the suburbs, that the same prohibition should exist there. It is a matter that I receive complaints about—that when sole operators in the suburbs are receiving clients their children are wandering in the streets. I am disappointed that members did not take this up and provide greater protection to children who come into contact with the sex industry. I put on record my thanks to the committee, the committee staff and those who contributed to the inquiry.
MR HARGREAVES (Brindabella) (11.30): The perspective that I believe applied in this particular case was that this should not be treated as a moral or a religious issue. This is about the operation of a legitimate occupation. If you do not want to engage in an occupation or be a consumer of that occupation, you do not have to. There is no compulsion. However, this is about safety. Later on I will talk some more about it.
One of the big issues for me was that, as the report says, you will see a dichotomy there. You will see proponents of the legislation wanting to develop it going forward, with the lessons that we have learnt in recent years. The opponents of the Prostitution Act remain opposed to it, as they were in 1992. They in fact have not got it yet—that the community has moved on from the position that they propounded then.
They also propose to recriminalise this issue. Of course, the community in the ACT have moved on—they moved on decades ago—from the need to introduce criminality. One of the major planks of the proponents of that view is to introduce the Swedish model. There is an indication at the back of the report on what that model is all about. But it has as its principal plank the transfer of criminality from the provider of the service to the purchaser of the service. That still means there is an element of criminality in it, and that element of criminality is what I objected to and rejected. I could not support any model which had as its principal plank criminalisation of this industry. There are elements in the report where we talk about criminality. That is fine, because those are elements, but it is not as a principal premise.
I would like to go through some of the recommendations which were significant to me. Ms Hunter will probably address some of the other ones; maybe, maybe not. Recommendation 1, for me, set a plank. In it we recommend that the industry be recognised in the community as an occupation. Indeed, I made that wrong. It should have been “continues to recognise this as an occupation”.
The recommendation continues by saying “that the legislation reflect this in its approach to occupational health hazards”. There is a similarity between this industry and some of the other higher risk ones in terms of occupational health and safety. I recall being around in the 1980s when HIV hit the deck in a big way and there were certain occupations which were regarded as high risk. And they were high risk
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