PRESS RELEASE

11 April 2016
Prostitution Law Reform Needs Serious Reform

The Conservative Party believes we have dropped the ball in leading the world in the area of protecting the vulnerable from exploitation and abuse. While countries like Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Northern Ireland, Canada and now France, have introduced the same legislation we had the opportunity to introduce in 2003, our most vulnerable continue to suffer at the hands of their oppressors. Parliament is doing nothing, and Local Bodies can do nothing.

Rachel Moran’s book, “Paid For, My Journey Through Prostitution” offers us a rare candid and honest assessment of life as a prostitute.

“Figures suggest at least 90 per cent of sex workers want to get out of the industry. The laws vary across Australia, but campaigners say places like Canberra, Victoria and New Zealand legalising prostitution simply means more trafficking and more acceptance of it,” the NZ Herald reported.

Rachel says, "'Sex work' ideology acts as a dehumanising force on numerous levels.
"There has perhaps never been an ideological framework in history that so thoroughly condones and emboldens the practice of oppression by the oppressed. It says, simultaneously, 'Continue to abuse us please' and 'Be at rest that there is no abuse going on here.'
"Women who espouse this view owe it to every other woman to abandon it. They are traitors to their sex and to themselves."

"It's all on the paradigm of male violence against women. It isn't a job like any other. Men who buy women for sex have no respect for women," says former prostitute Simone Watson. She also says that since the Nordic Model was introduced in Sweden there's been a cultural shift. "Young people grow up thinking the idea of buying sex is abhorrent."

When the Prostitution Law Reform Bill was before Parliament in 2003, conservatives of the day voiced these very concerns, and proposed then that the buyers of sex should be criminalised, because the women were already the victims. But their voices fell on deaf ears.

“Surely it is time to revisit the disaster of the Prostitution Reform Act 2003 and amend it to bring women and communities the protection they deserve,” says Conservative Party Spokesman, Leighton Baker.

ENDS

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