This ain’t no erection election!
BY FIONA PATTEN
If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of people in Sydney who don’t mind watching a bit of porn every now and then, you’ve suddenly become a freedom fighter. The right to watch porn in NSW is now an activist issue closely linked to the right to sell it, after new legislation was introduced late last year. And now it could be an election issue.
Under Labor, police have been given censorship powers which means that when they raid the local adult shop they have the power to almost force the shop owner to agree to whatever classification they think an adult film might be. Mostly they will never watch the film to make a determination. They’ll simply judge it on the box cover. But that’s all the law requires of them and with no training in classification matters at all.
What is makes this such a political issue is the fact that last year the NSW Labor government sent a 40 year old Oxford Street adult shop owner to jail for selling X rated DVDs. It was the first time anywhere in Australia that this has happened. These were films that had been passed by Commonwealth censors as suitable for all Australians. They were films that are sold openly in Paris, London, New York and Auckland. But in Sydney now – its go to jail.
In the face of a jail sentence, police can exert enormous pressure on a defendant to agree to their evaluation of a film even though they would have as much understanding of the difference between R, X and RC classifications as the average person in the street.
Why has Labor suddenly become so prescriptive about sex? Perhaps it’s the Premier, Kristina Keneally, who is a member of the ultra conservative wing of the Catholic Church, Opus Dei. Remember Silas, the Pope’s blond hatchet man in the Da Vinci Code who flagellated himself and wore hair shirts? He was Opus Dei. Or maybe it’s the Attorney General, John Hatzistergos – an old cardigan wearer from the 1950s and a deeply religious right wing Labor machine man. During his time as Attorney General, NSW jails have filled with Aborigines and people who have mental health issues or drug problems and should not be in prison.
Having a Police Commissioner who is a born again Baptist and who ordered special police monogrammed bibles at taxpayer expense, doesn’t help the situation either.
The porn legislation late last year was supported by most in the parliament with a couple of notable exceptions. In the words of its own Legislative Review committee, it was “an undue trespass on personal rights and liberties” with “a lack of fairness in scope and operation”. Labor’s own Upper House President, Amanda Fazio, was the only one in the major parties to speak out against the new laws. She ended up crossing the floor and putting her party membership at stake as well as her position in the Parliament. Incredibly, Clover Moore didn’t say a word and quietly voted for the legislation. Given that this was a direct hit against local businesses in her electorate, you have to ask ‘why’?
Last week, over 100 people attending the Future Music Festival at Randwick Racecourse were busted for personal possession of drugs. Police with sniffer dogs patrolled the venue like Gestapo officers at a Jewish rally. Only a few weeks before, the Labor government had sent 50 police officers to Nimbin to set up road blocks and deploy police dogs to arrest or caution 20 people for personal possession of pot. Scoring and smoking pot or ecstasy has become a major issue under Labor, facilitating more police resources than at any other time.
But Labor’s rule will come to end on March 26 and maybe there’ll be some respite from this modern ‘Inquisition’. Yeah, right… All the indications are that it will get a lot worse. The Liberal Party is also dominated by religious ideologues who feel that they have to impose their religious convictions on others and indeed it appears that this is one of their reasons for entering parliament. The main power broker and pre-selection gate-keeper is David Clarke, a right wing Catholic ideologue who may well be the most conservative politician in Australia. In his maiden speech, he promised to “uphold and advocate the conservative, mainstream and Christian-based truths and values that I believe our nation is based upon … with missionary zeal”. The new Attorney General will be Greg Smith another devout Catholic and former President of the New South Wales Right to Life Association.
The worst possible scenario would be for the Liberals to win and to have either the Rev Fred Nile (Christian Democrats) or the Rev Gordon Moyes (Family First) holding the balance of power in the upper house. Already the Liberals have indicated that they will give their second preferences to Fred. If this happens, watch out. Fred Nile has already indicated that he wants to make the possession of X rated films illegal in NSW. He also wants a major crackdown on drugs – if indeed there is room to crackdown any more after Labor’s draconian period. The Kings Cross injecting room would go, as would the possibility of any more of these life-saving and money saving facilities.
As for other reforms like repealing Labor’s ban on commercial surrogacy or ending John Hatzistergos’ endorsement of the law that allows religious schools to expel gay students, don’t hold your breath. Unless there’s some concerted action on the streets of Sydney and some real demonstrations of how fed up with this crap we really are, things will slide from bad to worse. Just wait and see how long it is before legislated dress codes like swimsuit measurements and ‘above the navel’ jeans are discussed in the parliament. Fred Nile’s attempts to tell ethnic groups in NSW how they will dress is just the beginning.
Fiona Patten is the President of the Australian Sex Party. Her party was ruled to be too late to register for the NSW election over 18 months ago.
