Page 729 - Week 02 - Thursday, 23 February 2012
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We engaged very much in the discussion about the industry and the issues raised by some around trafficking and so forth. Again, we picked up on those issues in the report, I believe. One of them was around the idea of exit programs for women or sex workers who want to leave the industry. There was a discussion around the fact that we could see that there may be people who could benefit from advocacy and support, for instance, in moving from one type of employment out to other types of employment and whether that be retraining. Of course, we have many wonderful women’s services across the ACT that work in the area of employment, they work in the area of counselling and support. We have a wonderful organisation set up to provide business outfits and so forth for women who are re-entering the workforce.
It was not about saying, “We don’t take this seriously or don’t see a need for women to be supported, no matter their circumstance, if they choose to take a different path in life in their employment status, for instance.” It was about saying, “Yes, that should be supported, and we have this wonderful collection of programs and it’s about how we can support them to be able to access that in the first instance.” That is why I feel that some of the comments do not quite hit the mark.
Going back to the recommendations in the report, I believe the Canberra community, generally speaking, is not pushing for a change for us to go back 20 years to make this a criminalised industry, to make this an illegal industry. I guess that is where we were coming from—it is timely after 20 years to review the act to see where we are up to. The occupational health and safety issues are important to ensure that those who are working in the industry are not exposed to occupational hazards, whether they be health hazards or whatever.
We picked up on the issue that there needs to be a better inspection regime and that five years was too long. Certainly we have put in a recommendation about having that on a more regular basis and being more clear and transparent about how that happens. The majority of the committee recommends that we change the name of the act to the commercial sexual services act and that references to “prostitute” in the act should be changed to “sex worker” and references to “prostitution” should be changed to “sex work”. This is in line with other jurisdictions. I think that in 2012 it is appropriate that we move in this direction.
As I said before with regard to absolute liability, that had the majority support of the committee. It is an area where we really need to ensure that the community standard is that those under the age of 18 do not work in the sex industry.
We also talked about the Health Act, the health regulations and the provision in the Prostitution Act at the moment around the issue of those who may have HIV or workers who may be exposed to HIV. It was felt that there was an overlap between the current Prostitution Act and the current health regulations and that the health regulations suffice in that regard. So that was another recommendation put forward by the committee.
We also put forward a recommendation around funding a culturally and linguistically diverse outreach program for ACT sex workers. We know there are many sex workers
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