Smith Murray: Prostitution Reform Bill — In Committee 
Smith Murray: Prostitution Reform Bill — In Committee 
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MURRAY SMITH (United Future) 
: 
 In reporting back on this bill the Justice and Electoral Committee stated that the bill was not intended to equate with the promotion of prostitution as an acceptable career option but instead to enable sex workers to have access to the same protections that are afforded to other workers and to make it easier for them to exit the industry. Tonight Maurice Williamson has stated that he wishes that prostitution did not exist. It appears that a number of speakers have indicated that their view is that prostitution is a negative factor in our society but they somehow see that this bill will insist on reducing the incidence of prostitution rather than increasing it.  
Firstly I say I have a huge amount of sympathy for women who find themselves trapped in this industry who want to exit it and who find that there are reasons that they cannot whether those reasons are psychological in terms of being scared to approach people for assistance or are that the women are being victimised in some other way. But this legislation will not make it easier for people to exit the industry. This legislation commercialises the industry and if this bill passes it is inevitable that prostitution will increase and will be in one’s face. In terms of our society this legislation will change it for the worse. Basically this legislation will commercialise the industry and open it up to market forces. We need only to compare this industry with other industries and to look at the effect of market forces on other products that are sold in those industries to see exactly the sort of thing that will happen.  
I will start by quoting from the  
Dominion Post 
 of Wednesday April 9 from an article entitled “Madam opens hanky-panky sex school”. It reads: “The former madam of a Dutch escort agency has opened a Hanky-Panky School for Prostitutes to teach the world’s oldest profession how to make more money. Elene Vis whose autobiography  
Escort Queen with Turbopower 
 made her a Dutch tabloid darling opened the school last week in a luxury Amsterdam canal house to offer prostitutes ‘exclusive sales training’ to boost their business. ‘You could call it sales techniques. You have to sell yourself and it doesn’t matter if you sell your body or you sell vacuum cleaners. The principle is exactly the same’ Vis 43 says. Vis once dubbed ‘the five-star madam’ ran a firm providing expensive escorts to wealthy clients for 20 years. She says the men and women prostitutes who worked for her agency could make about EUR$6000 (NZ$12000) a month for 40 hours’ work.”  
Now if that is a lessening of the industry I fail to see just how people can rationalise that. That is the sort of thing we will see coming into New Zealand as market forces start to dictate what happens and as groups see prostitution as a way of making significant amounts of money. In the  
Dominion Post 
 on 2 May there was an article entitled “Madam excites the Stock Exchange” which stated: “Australian investors plunged into the world’s oldest profession yesterday when a Melbourne company became the globe’s first listed brothel. Shares of the bordello’s enterprise which hired Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss to spice up its listing and touts itself as a recession-proof five-star hotel doubled on their first day of trading. About 1.4 million shares of the company—called The Daily Planet—sold. ‘Obviously the price is going to go up. It’s sex … and everyone knows sex is a smart investment’ Fleiss said just before the shares started trading.” Any suggestion that commercialising the sex industry by freeing it up and allowing free market forces to operate will reduce the incidence of prostitution is really out of this world. 
Peter Brown 
: Absolute rubbish. 
MURRAY SMITH 
: I totally agree; it is complete rubbish. What will we see? What will our society be like? Maurice Williamson has challenged people to stand up here in the Committee and talk about what our society will be like. Let us talk about advertising. Sue Bradford talked about how we will restrict advertising. If the amendments are passed—and we are yet to see that happen—we will have no newspaper advertising except for advertisements in the classified columns. There is to be no advertising on television or radio. OK. So if a person who is selling sex services wants to increase the profitability of doing so that person will look at other ways of advertising. What about letterbox drops of brochures? What about supermarket charge-out slips? What about some of the discount voucher books that go out? There is no way that we will stop every form of advertising that it is possible to use. 
Larry Baldock 
: Women in windows. 
MURRAY SMITH 
: Exactly. As my friend says there will be women in windows. It will be legal to put signage on buildings. Again there are amendments to try to restrict where that signage will be but we will find that brothels are quite entitled to put up neon signs particularly in commercial areas to advertise the products and services that they provide and that will be in people’s faces. I do not want to have to walk down commercial streets and find the situation again of women being in shop windows as they are in Amsterdam.  
What about street soliciting? There is no doubt from the statistics and the information that we have that street soliciting will increase particularly among women who find that it is difficult to get into brothels—whether for health reasons or for whatever other reason. Once a regime is put in that tries to restrict people in brothels those who cannot get into brothels will find other ways to sell their services. We will find that that will be in our faces. As we go down Willis Street Lambton Quay Queen Street or wherever else we go we will find more prostitutes there because prostitution will be legal and they will be entitled to be there.  
Market forces will increase prostitution. There will be more prostitutes. Brothels will outbid each other to get business. What happens when agencies try to outbid each other? They have to compete and they have to provide a new product. Brothels will have to provide for more bizarre sexual activity and to push the boundaries of legality. We will get into sadism bestiality and necrophilia. That might sound strange and far-fetched but I can guarantee members that as market forces play out and as brothels compete with each other to get more and more business they will push the limits as far as they can go.  
In terms of illicit material we already know that the underage use of pornography is a real problem and that will be pushed. People will try to provide younger and younger prostitutes knowing that while they may get caught for doing that they may also get away with it. There is no requirement for the production of proof of age. We have taken out of the bill the requirement that age has to be proved and that is just an open-door invitation for underage prostitution.  
There will be trafficking in women. As the number of brothels increases and as they have to get new women and provide new activity they will inevitably bring women in from overseas who will either willingly or unwillingly become engaged in the industry. That is already happening. There are already vulnerable Asian women and children and Lianne Dalziel’s bill simply tries to put a patch on a small element of that. There are plenty of other ways that that sort of thing will happen. If students are to be told that they cannot become prostitutes there will be other ways of bringing people in under other schemes.  
The warning signs are there in the multitude of amendments before this Committee that we have a bill that people do not consider satisfactory. It has gaping holes in it and people are trying to bring Supplementary Order Papers in as a patchwork in order to try to patch some of the leaks in this bill. But that patchwork will not survive. One can put as many patches as one likes on this bill but those who want to push the market forces and to make money from prostitution—and there will certainly be people like those mentioned in the newspaper articles I have quoted who will want to do that—will find ways round that in order to earn money. We are opening a Pandora’s box here and no amount of amendments will succeed in closing it. We are getting ourselves into serious trouble under the false pretence that we are helping those women by changing the law. We are not helping them but are simply making it easier for people to exploit them.