Driving from Canberra to Melbourne on the Hume Freeway is an easy trip these days. The road bypasses all the major towns and there’s plenty of open space where you can just let your mind free-range as the kilometres go by. Between Yass and the dozy little town of Bookham, the road rises up into what appears to be a cleft in the mountain range. As you shift down a gear to get to the top of the rise, the road starts to widen at the same time as the grasslands above you appear to come together. It’s a strange feeling. Large grey cement patches now line the walls on either side as you move into the centre of the mountain. It feels like being in the cleft of a huge brain—and then a sign whizzes by on the left saying ‘Conroy’s Gap’.
In late 2007 and early 2008, the federal Labor government’s new Minister for Communications, Stephen Conroy, announced to the world that he was preparing to introduce an internet filter to get rid of child porn, illicit sex, violence and terrorism. In the years preceding this announcement, phone sex on the 1900 platform had been banned. Australian adult websites had been banned from setting up and being hosted within Australia. John Howard had tried to ban and then further restrict what could be shown in an X-rated film. R-rated computer games had been banned. State governments and local councils were cracking down on sex wherever they saw it.
Now Conroy wanted to take censorship of the internet to a new level by introducing the forced filtering of internet service providers, a path that totalitarian states like China and Iran had recently trod. It was a big, grey monolithic policy that had the potential to be everything that George Orwell warned us about in 1984. For me, it was Conroy’s Gap: a policy framed by moral panic and bad polling that was being driven through a deep gouge in Labor logic. And, in that space, the Sex Party was born.
At this time I was back into my role as Eros CEO even if I was living in Sydney and outside the Eros office in Canberra. Robbie and I had approached the Police Credit Union again about extending our mortgage to build a large office at the back of the house to accommodate extra staff as Eros’s work load increased. I think I subconsciously sensed that Eros was about to morph into something bigger again.
A couple of weeks after Conroy’s announcement, the likely effects of a filter became apparent to my Eros members. Their future plans were toast if it materialised. We’d heard it all before: government bans and restrictions aimed at eliminating violence and terrorism, but, in the end, just banning sex. We needed to fight this like before, but we needed something new.
After the 2007 federal election, the Family First Party held the balance of power in the Australian Senate. Fred Nile still presided over a similar position in the NSW Parliament and in Queensland an ultra-conservative independent, Liz Cunningham, held the key to government. A high-Anglican morality campaigner and attorney-general from South Australia, Michael Atkinson, was holding the Standing Committee of State and Commonwealth Attorneys-General (SCAG) to ransom on R-rated computer games and other issues. In the ACT, two morality campaigners—a former Canberra Raider and a former policeman—had also held the balance of power for a number of years.
Many local councils were also now being driven by one or two religious councillors to enact ridiculous local laws on adult venues. Whenever an adult bookshop made an application to open in Australia, religious groups represented by these councillors immediately lodged complaints about the negative effects to the community. They presented no formal research, no scientific evidence and no facts to back their assertions. And yet time after time, local governments buckled to these fraudulent claims and either refused a development application or forced the applicants to disprove the assertions in costly legal proceedings.
I remember talking about it one night over dinner with Robbie on one of my regular visits back to Canberra. He was plating up his signature pineapple tofu dish. He had recently been featured as a minor celebrity in Susan Parson’s cooking pages in the Canberra Times. The dish had been photographed in all its beige and yellow glory and he was keen to make it for me. I would have preferred a steak, but I wasn’t complaining. He did the cooking and I did laundry and it worked fine.
I was busy in the dining room arranging the napkins and lighting the two little sterling silver candles that sat on the end of the long table. These little dining rituals drove Robbie mad. He was a TV-dinner kinda guy. But it was in my genes to ‘make the table’, and although I was the first person to dance on the table as the night wore on, I liked to eat my meals in the tradition of my mother and grandmother.
‘Why is it that only religious nutters hold these balance of power positions and never sex workers or strippers!’ I shouted to him in the kitchen.
‘Religious politicians have big congregations behind them,’ he shouted back. ‘It’s almost like you have to form your own political party to fight them.’
I moved the mustard pot into the centre of the table, but the thought of forming a political party got stuck between the sterling silver salt and pepper shakers. I could sense he was going deeper on it as well when he came out from the kitchen.
‘What . . . you mean, like, form our own party?’
‘Well, yeah, maybe . . .’
‘What, like, the Sex Party!?’
The was a moment of silence before we both laughed out loud.
‘The Sex Party!’ We both said it again. And again, like a mantra, taking it to different level. We both looked at each other and knew that it was very good.
* * * *
The next day we formed a small working party—Ken Hill from Club X and Sexpo, and the CEOs of the two public adult companies, Craig Ellis from Gallery Global Networks and Malcolm Day from Adultshop.com—to get the concept of a political party out to Eros members. Within a few weeks we organised a meeting with a broader group of members at Melbourne International Airport to ratify the approach.
Mal Day and a couple of other large distributors hated the party name. They thought we needed to move as far away from sex as possible. Ken Hill argued strongly for it, saying that anything less would be too bland for where we were coming from. Robbie argued that if we weren’t comfortable in our own skin, no one else would be. In the end, sex won the day.
We drew up a constitution and prefaced it with a suitable quote from the great philosopher and psychologist Havelock Ellis: ‘Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.’ That should leave the ACT incorporations office in no doubt as to where we were coming from, I thought. We cobbled together a suite of policies based loosely around censorship, gay rights, drug law reform and rolling back the nanny state. Then we began the search for 500 registered members. I could count about 100 from within our family and friends, but to get the bulk of the names we needed a large event where there would be plenty of like-minded people.
Melbourne’s 2008 Sexpo in November was the ideal occasion and not just for the crowds. Sexpo organisers had just been told that this was their last gig at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. The reason given was that overseas exhibitors from more prudish countries would not hire other parts of the building while Sexpo was on. So we had a barrow to push as well.
On 20 November, the first day of Sexpo, I proudly announced the launch of the Australian Sex Party to 100 exhibitors, guests and journalists. I said the party was a sign of the times and an acknowledgement of the importance and scope of sex and gender issues in ordinary people’s lives.
‘People want their House of Reps members to balance the budget, but increasingly they want their senators to look after their rights and freedoms,’ I said. ‘The Sex Party is the beginning of a new chapter in upper house politics.’
* * * *
The party’s first priority was to alert Australians to Conroy’s proposed internet filtering scheme and the fact that it even threatened the existence of the Sex Party online through over-zealous filtering.
‘Community attitudes to sex and censorship have been shown over and over again in polls to be more relaxed than ever and yet, in politics, the opposite is the case. When was the last time you heard a politician say something positive about sex?’ I asked the gathering at Sexpo.
The party would co-opt Australia’s 1000 adult shops as individual branches of the party and the four million Australian adults identified in La Trobe University’s Sex in Australia survey (2006), who regularly purchased X-rated films, vibrators, adult books and lingerie, would make up its initial audience.
Finally, I left them with the idea that discrimination against sex industry workers and companies was rife in the community and that the party would work to bring in laws that would outlaw job and occupational discrimination.
‘The Victorian government and the Melbourne Exhibition Centre Board have thrown Sexpo out of the MEC next year because they don’t want to offend overseas countries who are shy around sex and want to hire another part of the building,’ I said. ‘Why should 70,000 ordinary Victorians miss out on their favourite show because their government is being overly cautious and bending their knee to puritanical regimes from overseas’?
We signed up over 1000 new members that weekend. Back in Canberra the following week, we threw a dinner for half-a-dozen party members and friends who came in and helped us prepare the 500 membership forms with the constitution to send off to the Australian Electoral Commission.
But before the ink (and red wine my father had spilled) had dried on our application to register the party, a couple of public sex debates broke out that were ripe for political comment. A few years earlier, Pauline Hanson had come out about her affair with her then staffer, David Oldfield. Now two Murdoch papers, the Sunday Mail and Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph, had run front-page photos of a naked young woman who they said was Pauline Hanson above a heading that screamed, ‘Please Explain’.
While the photos certainly looked like her, the paper’s reason for running the story was basically slut-shaming. It’s probably the first and only time I will defend Hanson over anything, but running a front-page story that she had posed naked as a young woman in the week before she contested the seat of Beaudesert in the Queensland state election could not go unchallenged. It was also a ‘hypocrite’ alert for Murdoch papers, which were running increasingly voyeuristic articles about the sex industry but unlike their earlier attitudes, were now starting to refuse to run sex industry ads. Hanson had vehemently denied the photos were of her and to prove it she said she would show her belly button in court to show she had an ‘innie’.
As CEO of Eros, I issued a media release saying there was no public interest whatsoever in publishing nude photos of a candidate during an election campaign just for the shock value of it. ‘If this had happened to a sitting member, it would have been viewed as a contempt of parliament and dealt with accordingly, I said. Ms Hanson should have been protected by the parliament that she was trying to gain election to.
Public interest, I said, could only legitimise the publishing of private sexual information or photos in cases where monumental hypocrisy or illegal behaviour such as in the case of the former member for Capricornia, Keith Wright. ‘Ms Hanson has never espoused policies or agendas related to sexual behaviour which would have made the publishing of those photos in the public interest,’ I concluded.
The day after my media release, Robbie found a series of photos of a young female model in an obscure adults-only magazine from the Netherlands called Colour Climax. They were the spitting image of both Pauline Hanson and the model on the front pages of the papers. The young woman’s partner in the photographic essay was none other than the legendary Long Dong Silver, a small, modest-looking black man with the largest penis in the adult industry. The main photo showed his gargantuan organ extending all the way to his knee with the surprised doppelgänger holding a hand to her cheek in a classic, ‘Oh dearie me, I’m about to faint’ pose. I sent out another media release claiming that this was the ‘fake’ Pauline Hanson in the Murdoch papers and attached the photo. Fairfax ran with the head- and-shoulders version, but their photo department reserved their right to allow journalists access to the whole photo.
Two months later, Four Corners aired a report claiming group sex and rape were endemic in the National Rugby League. The program outlined details of several scandals over the previous years, including a group-sex session with former player and now footy commentator Matthew Johns and another five players. The woman at the centre of it also said that Cronulla captain, Paul Gallen, had been in the room. The most disturbing thing about the allegations were the large number of players who didn’t participate in the sex but were said to have stood around the room masturbating like zombies. Could this be the result of being in too many scrums over the years, I wondered, or was it more closely connected to male drinking patterns? I called for more NRL sex education about the role of brothels and escort agencies and the need for teams to seek out and adopt their local brothel.
‘Footballers who want to engage in group sex should be educated by their clubs about how to organise these liaisons as legal, commercial arrangements,’ I said in a national media release. ‘Most rugby league clubs have made brothels and escort agencies “no-go” areas for their players, thinking that they were enhancing the moral standing of their teams. In reality, these prudish bans on commercial sex have inadvertently led to an increase in group sex with groupies who try to access popular players. The NRL needs to set up a brothel liaison office and to conduct brothel information sessions with all players, including those who profess to be religious.’ The last line was aimed at the large number of NRL players who had just come out as practising Christians. A Christian Footballers Group had been formed a couple of years earlier by none other than the former Canberra Raider and balance-of-power politician in the ACT Legislative Assembly, Paul Osborne.
As the AEC edged closer to registering the Sex Party, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), who had a blacklist of banned sites, was hacked and had the list published by WikiLeaks. At around the same time, the Classification Board’s website was hacked and had anti-censorship messages splashed on its homepage. While a lot of the ACMA list was child-porn related, the other half was all about legitimate, legal businesses, issues and information, and included religious groups, tour operators, animal carers and even a dentist. It was exactly as we had predicted a few months before. Conroy said it was a technical fault. For the fledgling Sex Party, it was our first public pat on the back, and in April 2009 I was invited on to SBS’s Insight program to discuss the government’s filter, with Stephen Conroy a fellow guest
To his credit, Conroy had met with me twice before the program. On both occasions, he had told me that the filter would not block any of my members’ content. Then he stopped taking my calls. My ally in the SBS audience was Mark Newton, CIO and network engineer for the telco, Internode. In front of the cameras, I argued strongly to Conroy that the internet was a global medium and did not recognise Australia’s narrow X-rated classification system. Therefore, unless he changed the incredibly narrow boundaries of the Refused Classification category, it would be as if X was banned anyway. It would also ban most of the images in legal Category 2 Restricted magazines and have a host of further unintended consequences. He didn’t see it that way, threatening dissenters with guilt trips. ‘If you don’t support the filter, you support child pornography,’ he tried to argue back, even though later he would admit that the filter would not stop child pornography.
At the end of the show, when all the participants moved over to the green room for tea and coffee, Conroy started yelling at me. ‘One fucking phone call, Fiona, that’s all it would have taken . . . Just one fucking call!’
I was slightly taken aback. ‘But I did try and call you . . .’
More haranguing ensued. My protests made no difference. He’d lost a couple of critical arguments on national television and had been seen to spawn a new political party against him. He was upset. I got it.
* * * *
On 17 June 2009, the AEC placed an ad in national newspapers stating that they had received an application for the registration of the Australian Sex Party and that they were now open for any objections. They got them in spades. They ranged from just being ‘inappropriate’ to ‘downright obscene’. A lovely husband and wife alleged that I was involved in ‘degrading women’ through an inferred association with paedophiles, drug dealing and sex slavery. The complaint that caused the most grief for the AEC, however, came from a well-known Catholic lobbyist in Canberra who claimed that our name would raise ‘orgiastic notions’ in the minds of voters who saw it on the ballot paper. It was classic moral panic. Did he really think people would start beating off in the polling booths or expose themselves after voting for the Sex Party?
Section 129(1)(b) of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 says that an application by a political party applying for registration will be refused where the name or abbreviation of the party name is, in the AEC’s opinion, ‘obscene’. This issue had never previously arisen before in Australia and it sent the AEC on a Monty Python-esque search for the real meaning of the word. It made me wonder how party names like Rise Up Australia, Love Australia or Leave, and Family First all managed to scoot through the obscenity test in previous years. Using defamation-type arguments, the imputations that arose from these names were incredibly obscene. And what about the Queensland-based party Country Minded? I mean, the name just said it all.
Another objection was to one of our credos: ‘The Sex Party—where you come first.’ It was obscene and related to male ejaculation, it was alleged. We argued that the objector was devoid of a sense of humour. We also claimed he was being chauvinistic in that he had failed to include the female orgasm in his complaint, although we were prepared to accept that he may not have ever heard of that. Regarding his assertions that we may use double entendre in political adverting, we pleaded guilty. To the suggestion that our name did not represent what we were really on about, we asked, ‘Does the Liberal Party represent “liberals”?’ ‘Does the Labor Party represent “labourers”. And does Family First really represent most families?’
In New South Wales, it had already been established that using the words ‘dickheads rule’ and ‘we’re screwed’ on how to vote cards was obscene. As to the nature of our party name, however, the AEC’s five-page report said it was unlikely to ‘deprave and corrupt’ voters and they dismissed the objections. They said that ‘public interest and concepts of free speech’ needed to be taken into account, and that when these concepts were balanced with the ‘double entendre’ it was difficult to reach a conclusion other than that the name is not obscene. The perception by any member of the public that the name was obscene was simply not enough to ban it. In a final media release, I wrote that the AEC appeared to be able to interpret community opinion on obscenity far better than the major political parties could. And, with that, the Australian Sex Party was officially registered on 9 August 2009.