Page 2444 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 31 July 2018
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enhances the health and safety of workers, reducing barriers to accessing services and supports because they can now report a crime to police without fear of being charged and prosecuted for being unregistered.
That is an important point. This is not about saying that the government thinks it is too difficult and we just want to make it go away. The reality is that people are not registering. We know that there are 14 people on the public register. All you have to do is open the Canberra Times one day and go to the back section; you will see that there are clearly more than 14 sex workers in Canberra. It is perfectly evident from the daily newspaper. And I am sure that is not a complete tally of who is in the industry in Canberra. I do not know how many people there are, and this provision will give us no further clarity.
This is not about saying it is too difficult; it is about acknowledging the fact that people are not doing it because they do not want to, for privacy reasons. That leads to people not going to health services and not contacting the police. That means that people are not accessing the sorts of safety and supports that we would want them to access in the event that something goes wrong or they feel they need that support. That is what is happening in the real world, and that is the basis on which the government is making these policy decisions.
Not requiring sole operators to register does not prevent agencies such as ACT Policing from undertaking investigations or serving warrants where they are relevant. And I certainly do not think it does anything in terms of trafficking, because, again, anybody who has been trafficked is not going to register as a sole operator.
Mrs Dunne: I did not say that.
MR RATTENBURY: I am not saying that you said that, Mrs Dunne, but that is one of the arguments that is floating around, and I think it is worth pointing that out. Someone who is operating illegally already is certainly not going to register. This is a discussion that I think is worth reflecting on.
The second point Mrs Dunne raised is the issue of removing the requirements around STIs. We do not support the amendments that prevent sex workers or clients with STIs from providing or receiving commercial sexual services. This is because, as I have said before, sex workers, just like anyone else in the community, have an obligation under the public health regulations to take all reasonable steps to prevent transmission of notifiable conditions.
Mrs Dunne talked about increasing prevalence. We know that the rate of use of prophylactics is higher amongst sex workers than in the general community. One could make the point that it is less likely that transmission will occur, and that is a worthwhile consideration.
The other point, as I touched on in my remarks this morning, is that people who have sexually transmitted infections can be either clients or sex workers. There is no reason they should not access these services, provided the right precautions are being taken. That is what we are doing here. We are taking away a discriminatory penalty
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