Kedgley Sue: Prostitution Reform Bill — In Committee 
Kedgley Sue: Prostitution Reform Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:608;Page:5228] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 I want to address briefly the issue touched on by the previous speaker and that is advertising. It is surprising that the bill does not cover that issue. That probably is a bit of an oversight and it is one that Parliament would be wise to rectify in the course of the Committee stage tonight. The truth of the matter is that unless there are some prohibitions on advertising once prostitution is decriminalised the newspapers television and radio will I assume be free to advertise sex. 
Libertarians might ask why prostitutes should not be able to advertise their services. The issue we need to consider here is our children. Do we want to see advertisements such as the large advertisements in the Yellow Pages? Do we want to see advertisements like that in the newspapers maybe on page 3 or page 2 and maybe on television and in places where our children will almost inevitably encounter them? I have no problem if advertisements are tucked away perhaps in text only in the Yellow Pages or indeed in the classified section of the newspapers. However I worry that if we do not have some prohibition in this bill we will end up with the possibility of those sorts of advertisements appearing right through our newspapers and on television and radio. 
I have great sympathy with the amendment Gordon Copeland has put forward calling for a complete prohibition on advertising. However many people have pointed out that if there was a complete prohibition on all advertising of prostitution we might very well end up inadvertently and unintentionally simply encouraging prostitutes to walk the streets as their only means of trying to solicit business. I do not think that any of us would want that to happen as an unintended consequence of what seems like a very sensible amendment. 
So I propose an amendment to Gordon Copeland’s amendment that would state that there would be a prohibition on advertising except for the text-only publication of business details in business and telephone directories and advertising in the classified sections of newspapers and magazines. In other words prostitutes could readily advertise in the classified section of any newspaper or magazine but the advertisements would be quietly tucked away and hopefully they would not be exposed to all our children who I imagine do not spend their days flicking through the classified sections of newspapers and magazines. Prostitutes would also be able to advertise in the Yellow Pages but they would not be able to advertise anywhere else on television radio etc. 
My colleague Sue Bradford has proposed a slight variation on my amendment. She has proposed that we set up—and she will introduce the amendment herself but she is focusing on developing—a code of conduct around the commercial advertising of sex. My problem with that is that I have absolutely no faith in codes of conduct. I have spent many years looking at codes of conduct in respect of violence and all sorts of things. There are codes of conduct that state there should be no gratuitous violence on television yet our television screens are filled with gratuitous violence. That code is absolutely meaningless because there is no enforcement and no monitoring. In my view while Sue Bradford’s amendment is very well intentioned just simply developing a code would not be sufficient. While codes might make us all feel good and virtuous they do not seem to have any effect and we can see that in every single code of advertising that we have in every aspect whether it be food labelling violence or whatever else. 
So I suggest my simple amendment to Gordon Copeland’s amendment which states we should have a prohibition on the advertising of prostitution except for allowing the publication of details in telephone and business directories and advertising in the classified section of newspapers.