Bradford Sue: Prostitution Reform Bill — Second Reading 
Bradford Sue: Prostitution Reform Bill — Second Reading 
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SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 The debate we are having tonight about whether we take the next stage in voting to decriminalise prostitution in Aotearoa New Zealand is one of the most significant I have participated in since coming to Parliament 3 years ago. This is an issue that arouses huge emotions in many of us. Before going any further I would like to say as others here have that I respect the right of every other MP and every member of the public to hold their own particular beliefs and personal feelings on this very difficult and sensitive issue. At the same time however I would like to make a plea to all MPs who have not yet made up their minds either way to consider casting a vote in favour of decriminalisation at the end of the debate tonight.  
I am one of a fairly small number of MPs still in Parliament who have sat through the entire select committee process on this bill from beginning to end. We heard submissions from a huge variety of perspectives from sex workers nuns and feminists to brothel owners church leaders women’s groups local government representatives and a myriad of other people.  
We spent months and months discussing and researching with the help of officials the myriad of tricky issues that this bill raises. I have to say that I do not think we left any stone no matter how murky unturned. In the end the Justice and Electoral Committee did not make major changes to Tim Barnett’s original Prostitution Reform Bill as some would have the House believe. We did pass some clarifying amendments and did things like widening the responsibility for the provision of safe sex materials and setting up a review committee to monitor how the bill works out in practice but none of this in any way significantly changed its original concept intent or scope.  
To those MPs who supported this bill at the end of the first reading I would like to say that there is no reason to change their vote now. There has been intense lobbying of all of us over the last few weeks and months. Many many issues have been raised and while I would love to talk about all of them time constraints will obviously not allow that and I will stick to a few key points.  
First I believe that this issue is at heart a moral one. All sorts of other arguments are used to cloak that reality but I think that underneath all the words we are using here tonight and all the emotions what we are doing when we vote today is making a moral judgment. New Zealand laws around prostitution find their ancestry in Victorian England and further back than that in the Christian Bible. While I accept totally people’s right to their belief that for example prostitution is a sin I cannot accept their right to maintain that Christian sin should be a law in 2003 in a country that is not a theocracy and has no State religion. I do not think that people of one faith or a stream within one faith have the right to impose their moral precepts through law unless there is acceptance by wider society that a crime is actually being committed. For example our society does accept the biblical sin of murder as a crime but we do not accept that people who commit the biblical sin of adultery should likewise be sent to jail.  
I fundamentally question the right of the State in this day and age to interfere with the rights of people 18 years and over to have consensual sex with each other. There is no way that sex workers—mainly women—should continue to be open to harassment and prosecution for a victimless crime. Nor should we turn to the Swedish model which prosecutes the men who pay for sex. The Swedish experience shows that all that does is drive prostitution underground. In the UK laws criminalising the client have been tried for 17 years and there is no sign whatsoever that prostitution is dying out even though that is the main rationale for that type of law. While on the select committee we heard evidence from a sex worker in Sweden who talked about the much greater physical dangers she and others now face as a result of the law change there. She reported that some of the worst consequences of the Swedish law have been that there is a lot more underage teenage prostitution that the mafia bosses have more control and that workers are too scared to get police help even when friends are murdered because if it gets out that they have called the cops they lose all their customers. I would like to ask those feminists and Christians in the House who are so fond of the Swedish model whether they really think it preferable that we should impose greater criminalisation on the industry with all that that entails rather than remove sanctions and create the protections that come when prostitutes feel able to call police and other services for help when they need it without fear of persecution or of loss of trade.  
There is a feminist strand of thought that opposes this bill. This seems to come from a perspective that says that because prostitution is fundamentally an unpleasant yucky kind of thing for most people even to think about and because some sex workers have had abuse in their earlier lives somehow that means that all prostitutes should continue to be criminalised for their profession. As a lifelong feminist myself I acknowledge the desire behind that line of thought to bring an end to something that its proponents see as degrading and exploitative but I come from another strand of feminist thinking that believes that it is our job to do everything we can to make life better for all women even those who are in this most vulnerable of occupations. Unless we truly believe that prostitution is going to disappear altogether and soon I believe that the best we can do as feminists is to maximise the conditions that will help to end the worst excesses of violence coercion and exploitation rather than allow prostitution to continue as a subset of the criminal world.  
Rape physical assault theft of wages the threat of murder and other extreme forms of violence and exploitation are what many New Zealand prostitutes live with right now. In dealing with this bill we are not talking about some kind of abstract theory but about the reality of people’s lives. It is no use waiting for some utopian future to come true. I would much rather do everything I can right now to help protect and empower those who for whatever reason have chosen to make prostitution their occupation. This bill is a worker’s issue too as my colleague Lynne Pillay has so eloquently pointed out. I hope that people with union consciousness will see the sense in making that particular work environment one in which employees will have much more power to organise if this bill goes through.  
I think it is instructive to consider for a moment some of the groups that have come out strongly in support of the bill. Those include organisations like the Prostitutes Collective the AIDS Foundation the Salvation Army a number of sexual health services several community law centres the Family Planning Association the Citizens Advice Bureaux Women’s Refuge and Wellington Independent Rape Crisis. The people from those groups are those who work with and for prostitutes at grass-roots level. They know what is going on. As lawmakers we often justifiably try to give precedence to the views of those groups that are most intimately connected with any particular piece of legislation whatever the topic. I think that we should apply that principle here too and give priority to the voices of sex workers themselves and of those who work most closely with them. They want us to decriminalise prostitution now.  
Finally I am pleased to advise the House that in line with our Green Party women’s policy all nine of our MPs will be voting in support of decriminalisation. I hope that others here tonight will have the moral courage to face down the outrageous and totally unnecessary moral panic that has been created around this bill and join us in making that vote too.