Sex raids take us back to the ’50s

COMMENT

“Australia was a wowserish, six o’clock closing, heavily censored, deeply conservative Australia, and Goossens really was a victim of that.” – Michelle Arrow, Rewind, ABC TV 2004

Sir Eugene Goossens, Chief Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Director of the NSW State Conservatorium, was ambushed in 1956 as he arrived at Mascot Airport. Greeted by a posse of customs officials, detectives and journalists from The Sun tabloid, his luggage was searched, revealing naughty photos he had bought in Soho, London where a Sun reporter had been shadowing him.

This was enough to ruin him. Other charges of “Scandalous Behaviour” with Rosaleen Norton, the Witch of Kings Cross, were never laid despite explicit letters to Ms Norton which had been stolen from her Brougham Street flat in Kings Cross by a Sun journalist. Goossens was fined £100 and fled to England where he died a few years later of a ruptured ulcer.

Fast forward to the present and history is repeating. Now, although most pornography is legal to own in Australia, Customs are now asking arrivals if they are carrying any, and have begun searching people’s computers for evidence. One traveller who had three Youtube and three legal Youporn.com clips on his hard drive recently had his machine confiscated.

“My whole life is on that laptop,” he said. “My CVs, my work, my correspondence…”

Our new sex police are now also jailing people. A 2009 raid on an adult shop in Oxford Street resulted in a man being jailed for three months with a court-cost bill of $22, 460. Previously such convictions had resulted only in fines, and this was his first offence. Fines, however, can be steep – up to $11,000 per video on sale, even though these same videos are perfectly legal to own in NSW, are legally sold in the ACT and free of charge via the internet.

Ten Kings Cross sex shops were raided in 2007 on the pretext of child pornography, but none was found, contrary to claims made by MLC Fred Nile this week. This resulted in the ludicrous fact that you could buy porn anywhere in Sydney except the red light district, while teams of police dutifully watched sex films searching for “evidence”, at taxpayers’ expense.

And Senator Conroy’s drive to filter the internet strayed into moral panic when  customs staff were briefed in a training session that sex videos depicting women with small breasts should be blocked in case some viewers might imagine they were under 18. This has since been denied, but Robbie Swan from the Australian Sex Party (ASP) was in the room and heard it.

Imagine a Conroy future in which all women in available porn have silicone-enhanced breasts, and what this might do to sexual stereotyping. This illustrates the dangers of control – that information becomes restricted to the mental or moral limits of the controller, and that over-regulation creates unintended distortions.

In the past fortnight, two more Kings Cross adult shops were raided (see separate story).

This is not driven by public opinion. The ASP quotes ten surveys on the subject, and support for the legalised, regulated sale of X-rated material in Australia runs at 66–86 per cent.

So what’s behind this new witch-hunt? Simple wowserism according to Robbie Swan.

“Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott are as bad as each other – both are Christian conservatives,” he said.

But other motives have been suggested. There are rumours, all unconfirmed at present, that the raids are driven by lobbying from suburban-based rogue distribution companies, who are selling through video stores and newsagents.

Another theory is that big real estate interests want places like Kings Cross gentrified to raise prices and boost sales.

The raids certainly fit well into the larger War on Kings Cross. If adult shops are put out of business – and jail terms plus massive fines are a significant liability – then Council’s anti-cluster rules kick in, preventing another business of the same type from opening up within 75m of another.

Before the forced council amalgamation in 2004, South Sydney Council exempted Kings Cross from this rule, thinking these shops were better placed in the red light district than spread into the wider community.

But one of the first acts of the new City of Sydney was to apply the rule to Kings Cross.

At the time, power brokers such as Frank Sartor were eagerly advancing their intention to “civilise the Cross”, all very well if “civilisation” is defined as middle-class conservatism.

In this light, it would seem Mr Sartor and his ilk would have to label Sir Eugene Goossens as uncivilised.

The Sex Party also points out the hypocrisy involved, noting, while not condemning his habits, that David Campbell was Police Minister at the time of the 2007 raids. And his recent ‘outing’ by tabloid TV as a frequenter of a gay sex club has disturbing shades of 1956.

And beware: “Scandalous Behaviour” remains a crime in NSW. The Sex Party has mounted a petition to remove the pornography question from Customs forms. It’s at sexparty.org.au.

by Michael Gormly