Robbie says that I have the sort of personality that is best described by Chumbawamba’s irritating but lingering anthem to inner renewal, ‘Tubthumping’. The refrain is an energetic chant to dusting yourself off and having another go.
Wikipedia describes a ‘tubthumper’ as ‘someone, often a politician, seeming to “jump on the bandwagon” with a populist idea.’ The Urban Dictionary also defines the term as ‘a drink comprised of whisky, vodka, lager and cider’ and then, disturbingly, as ‘a turd so extraordinarily long that, when dropped, it thumps on the back of the toilet.’ Motions unparliamentary aside, I will grudgingly concede that some parts of that beverage might sometimes have had a bearing on my moods, but I reject the notion that I am a politician who jumps on populist bandwagons, although I have been known to jump on a few unpopulist ones. But it is true: I do recover from adversity quickly.
John Howard once described the possibility that he might bounce back from being dumped as Liberal leader as like ‘Lazarus with a triple bypass’ and Paul Keating once famously quipped that Andrew Peacock couldn’t make a political comeback because ‘a soufflé only rises once’. After running for public office six times before being elected, I think it’s fair to say that without that bounce-back gene I wouldn’t have kept at it. David Leyonhjelm’s electoral sting was tough enough. One minute I was standing there having a mature conversation, and then, out of nowhere—wham! I was staggering around the room with a giant headache and little chance of winning the election I’d worked so hard on. I think I had a quiet weep for a couple of minutes when I realised the consequences of his actions and then I was over it, determined not to have my political plans derailed by a conservative dressed in liberty’s colours. Besides, I still felt like I could carry my logical libertarian agenda into any parliament in Australia and make it work.
The more I looked at the Victorian parliament in the weeks and months after that federal election, the more convinced I became that it was a better platform from which to initiate social change, especially for an independent. Conservative independents who had managed to snag the balance of power in other parliaments had just about taken over the country. Geoff Shaw, the conservative independent in the previous Victorian parliament, had caused enormous problems for the Napthine government. He had no mandate, no policies and no reason to be there as an independent, having resigned from the Liberal Party just before they expelled him. He was facing misuse of parliamentary funds charges that could well have caused an early election.
The former accountant and nightclub bouncer was part of a charismatic Christian church and had very conservative social views on abortion, homosexuality and porn. He had been charged with assault before becoming a parliamentarian, led away from his ex-wife’s house by police, and was involved in a road-rage incident in his electorate that police also had attended. He had been part of a melee on the steps of the Victorian parliament in which another man had suffered facial wounds. If someone like that could get elected, surely a former sex worker could. So, with that in mind and the 2013 election now behind me, I started planning for the Victorian state election in November 2014.
Robbie, on the other hand, was over it. He wanted to move up to our mountain property on the edge of the Kosciuszko National Park, write a few books and take daily walks. Since 1981 Robbie had been transforming it into a 120-hectare wildlife and wilderness retreat, and he now managed it with my help. But as much as I liked time alone and a few days in the mountains, I loved living in Melbourne. As he turned 60, Robbie had entered a more meditative phase. He was thirteen years older than me. While we were in our thirties and forties, this age difference hadn’t meant much, but now I wasn’t so sure. I think we had a quiet moment or two at this point about how we would go forward as a couple.
We came to a tacit understanding that if I won, Robbie wouldn’t have to do the job with me, as long as I could still feel his support and wordsmithing. He wasn’t going to be employed on staff and wouldn’t have to attend a lot of party meetings or events. He would move out of his little Canberra unit and split his time between living in the bush and my place in Melbourne. It seemed like a good compromise.
Having contested six elections and narrowly missing out on winning two, a few of my Eros members were also starting to wonder if all this political effort was worth it. The time I spent on political and basic industry association issues was being questioned a little more than usual. While most of the political campaigns had not been about getting elected but getting exposure, they had nonetheless taken away resources from everyday industry association work. Persuading Eros board members that this was a valid path was made easier by deconstructing the industry’s major problems. When compared with European and US sex industry issues, Australia’s always came down to the politics of the situation. Eros’s lobbying over the years had been effective without nailing some of the big issues. Almost singlehandedly, we had established a nationwide grey market around some of the benchmark products and services, like X-rated films and some aspects of sex work in some states, that still remained illegal. This meant that while most of the time police turned a blind eye, traders were still at a huge disadvantage in the marketplace where they were regularly refused banking services, access to job creation schemes and other business facilities that most businesses just took for granted. The only way to change these entrenched cultures was to get active in political circles in the same way that the Church had done in the years before.
I started to look at a campaign to win a Victorian upper house seat. I chose the Northern Metro region because this was where I was living, but I also thought the last Liberal seat in this electorate was marginal and if there was a swing, it could easily come down to me or Family First.
As soon as Robbie saw my conviction, he committed to one more go, and in typical style and without saying anything he started his own private campaign. He contacted a group of Indian pundits from his meditation days and arranged for them to do a special Vedic ‘yagya’ or ceremony based on my time and date of birth, and a few other personal parameters. He paid a fee for a specific yagya that was supposed to assist people to get elected to public office by neutralising opposition and maximising ‘support of nature’. Being a student of Vedic and Western astrology over many years, he also consulted his old friend and mentor, the celebrity astrologer, Milton Black.
They were both adamant about the outcome. Jupiter, that great benefic in the sky, would come to a rare standstill on my Midheaven, or point of public recognition, on election day, and would stay there for four days while the votes were being counted. Apparently, I also had Pluto on my ascendant in something called my Solar Return, which happened less frequently than Halley’s Comet.
‘You can’t lose,’ Robbie said. ‘They’re once-in-a-lifetime transits. The odds on both of them occurring in the same cycle are like winning Lotto.’
I wasn’t convinced. For a party that prided itself on being pragmatic and evidence-based, some of Robbie’s spiritual ideas raised a few eyebrows among the rank and file. The campaign would be a hard slog because there would be more parties running in Northern Metro than ever before (eleven new ones) and I had no war chest to speak of. Rather than the outcome being determined by cosmic forces, my election would depend on hard work and some smart marketing. If elected, I could well be the first person from an industry association to be elected to a parliament in Australia. I would certainly be the first former sex worker. It wasn’t a bad position to campaign from, and soon we had a fresh campaign slogan—Take a New Position!
From the very beginning, this election campaign felt easier than the rest. I had a plan to engage with other minor parties that shared our agenda. I caught up with Voluntary Euthanasia party founder, Philip Nitschke, and floated the idea of doing some combined promotional work. Within a few weeks, we had done a joint letterbox drop, and later in the campaign we had three advertising scooters running around Melbourne’s CBD. We used the same artwork for our joint promotion card, which had an image of a corpse with a party going on in the background. The ticket on the big toe read, ‘Have a Happy Ending.’ Another one said, ‘We give a fuck if you want to kick the bucket.’
* * * *
Kris Schroeder was the lead guitarist for the Melbourne rock band, the Basics. He had formed the band back in 2002 with Wally De Backer (better known as Gotye), but when Kevin Rudd repealed the carbon tax in June 2013, the band got angry and formed the Basics Rock‘n’Roll Party to contest the federal election. Now they were running for the Victorian state election, but they were having trouble working out how to play the preference game and needed help. Strategically, the Sex Party needed to lift our primary vote by a percentage point or two early on in the count to get up and over some of the better known minor parties.
I sensed a mutual attraction and called Kris. Soon after, we agreed to join forces for the last six weeks of the campaign. They were very laidback and we enjoyed a few drinks together and a game of snooker or two. Together we hired a large, flat-bed truck, put the band on the back and covered it with promo banners that read, ‘Vote Sex, Drugs and Rock‘n’Roll’. The entertainment site Scenestr.com.au called it ‘a cheeky hat tip to AC/DC’s famous “It’s A Long Way to the Top” 1975 truck gig along Swanston Street’. I would jump up on the truck between songs and deliver a political message on behalf of both parties. The truck stopped at various shopping centres and we even did a gig outside the former Pentridge jail.
When it came time to submit the Group Voting Tickets at the Victorian Electoral Commission on Hoddle Street a week out from the election, Kris wandered up with his card to show me. Freak out! He’d put Family First at number two after Ashley Fenn, their candidate for Northern Metro had called him and asked to exchange second preferences. Kris thought Family First sounded like a friendly name and, without knowing anything about them, thought it was no big deal. When I told him what they stood for, he was horrified and immediately wrote out a new ticket with the Sex Party at the number-two spot. That change would prove to have been crucial in my election.
* * * *
Working with Voluntary Euthanasia and the Rockers was easy and enjoyable. I liked forming coalitions in a way that benefitted both of us to the detriment of the major parties. Of course, a Sex Party election campaign wouldn’t be complete without a bit of outrageous humour and satire. We looked at the worst possible outcome in terms of moral crusaders getting elected to the upper house and decided to create a collectors’ card set for the event. We called it the House of Horrors with the tag line, ‘Don’t Let Victoria Collect the Set’. We printed 30 packs and sent them to media. The deck included Pastor Danny Nalliah from Rise Up Australia looking like a mythical being from Dante’s ‘Inferno’; Inga Peulich from the Liberal Party dressed as Dracula, and Kathleen Maltzahn from the Greens, as the harpy from hell. As soon as they were printed they were gobbled up and the Museum of Democracy is about the only place to see one now.
As the election drew near, a sex scandal hit the Liberal Party and drew some very interesting lines in the sand. They disendorsed their candidate for the seat of Thomastown, Nitin Gursahani, claiming he had links with Bollywood actress and porn star Sunny Leone, and that he was intending to host a number of events for her in the final week of the campaign. Leone, star of such epic features as Alabama Jones and the Busty Crusade, had pretty much traded her porn career in for Bollywood and was doing well. But the Libs were having none of it, saying Gursahani ‘did not reflect the values that underpin our party’ and had not been forthcoming about his business interests in the application process.
It was a prudish and unnecessary thing to do in the last week of a campaign that humiliated one of their own for the sake of some quaint notion of Victorian-era morality. It had a ring of no-confidence about it and I thought it made the Liberals look weak and intolerant. We had run porn stars in almost every campaign and the media just accepted it. In fact, only a few months before this, two Sex Party candidates, Zahra Stardust and Angela White, had entered the record books by becoming the first two registered political candidates to make an X-rated film together. No one cared. People magazine was the only media outlet interested enough to cover the occasion. Mind you, the DVD was popular. Another first for us was running an ‘out’ HIV-positive candidate, Joel Murray, as my number two-candidate. Joel was described by one media outlet as the only candidate in the field to sport a nose ring.
In the last couple of weeks, I started hitting the phones trying to lock in preference deals. We were sweet with fellow travellers like the Cyclists, the Rockers and the Voluntary Euthanasia Party, but when it came to larger parties like Palmer United Party (PUP), I had no idea where we stood. Family First had been telling minor parties that they could bring PUP’s preferences to the table in a deal.
I’d had a couple of calls with their preference advisor, James McDonald, who personally wanted to do a deal but I could tell he was being constrained by other quarters. He denied that there was any deal with Family First. About two weeks out from the election, PUP announced they wouldn’t be standing any lower house candidates, so I decided to go straight to the horse’s mouth and call Clive Palmer about the upper house. He was rude and abrupt on the phone: after I introduced myself and asked a general question about their preference strategy, he simply said, ‘We don’t need that,’ and hung up on me.
The Greens stayed well away from us. They knew we had enormous issues with their Richmond candidate, Kathleen Maltzahn. Not only was she opposed to sex work but she was a supporter of former Brian Harradine staffer and Collective Shout founder, Melinda Tankard Reist. Maltzahn claimed to base her objections to sex work on feminist principles, but the flawed logic in her rhetoric said otherwise. Her position was that all women who were sex workers were victims of men’s uncontrolled lust and needed to be saved. She never applied that same logic to male sex workers, whether they were servicing men or women. She was touting that classic male chauvinist position that says women are weak and incapable of looking after themselves, but men are strong and so must be okay.
Her constant labelling of Australia’s 10,000 female sex workers as ‘victims’ also added to the weight of stigmatisation that they already laboured under. Again, not a very feminist thing to do to your sisters. If she was elected, I believed that Maltzahn would have pushed the Greens towards criminalising sex work in Victoria, along with other aspects of the adult goods and services industry. If you believe that all sex work is abusive and demeaning, then people who perform in X-rated films are almost in the same category.
I had long suspected that she was not alone in the Greens about pushing this agenda, and that if she had been elected it would have emboldened many in that party to embrace wowserism more than they already did. As it was, the Greens in Victoria were not allowed to accept passes to go to the races or the footy, which in my opinion, was like being part of an Amish community. Admittedly, they’d like to ban horse racing altogether so they claim it’s to stop corruption but how much can you corrupt someone with a free ticket to the footy?
Damien Mantach was the Liberal’s preference organiser and he was keen to do business, but told me I was up against it because Family First were running candidates in every lower house seat. That meant they had a huge bargaining chip when it came to preferences in the upper house. When I looked at that more closely, I discovered they were running husbands and wives as separate candidates in seats that were hundreds of kilometres apart. They also had very few supporters on the ground to hand out how to vote cards in many of these electorates, which made their support look paper thin. We had increased our volunteer base significantly and had all seats covered.
Still smarting from the federal preference sting in 2013, I was hesitant to deal with the Liberal Democratic Party in Victoria but, in the end, pragmatism overrode principle. If I could agree on a deal and meet their representative as they walked into the Victorian Electoral Commission to lodge their GVT, I could check it and then adjust my ticket accordingly. No more Mr Nice Guy on the phone. But, unbelievably, the LDP’s Les Hughes wanted to deal with Family First in my Northern Metro region. After a twenty-minute conversation during which I reminded him that Family First would try and scupper just about every LDP policy if they were elected, I managed to talk him down. I couldn’t, however, get him over the line in the South East region, where he insisted on preferencing Danny Nalliah from Rise Up Australia. This, he figured, would stop the evil Greens from winning the seat.
As it turned out, that preference flow for Nalliah actually led to the Greens beating the Sex Party in that seat by 250 votes.
Labor wanted us to give them everything. Noah Carroll played hardball with me to get second preferences in Northern Metro. He knew that without their big dump of unused votes at the end of the count, it would be hard for us to win, but I wasn’t going to give away the chance for Sex Party candidates in other seats to get elected just to maximise my own chances. After three very intense meetings, I had a deal in place that we would preference them above the Libs and the Greens in some lower house seats and they would preference us second in Northern Metro and high up in two other regions. That could potentially see three of us get elected as long as we got enough early preferences in the count. This also meant that the Labor/Greens nexus that caused so much trouble in the 2013 federal election was finally broken.
As usual the Greens were the meanest and hardest to deal with. They were incredibly prescriptive and handed me a list of acceptable minor parties (acceptable to them) that we could place before them in each electorate. We finally came to an agreement that varied greatly across seats.
While all this was going on, I wrote an editorial for The Age that put the case for legalising both medical and recreational cannabis. I knew it was a gamble of sorts because to do it effectively I would have to out myself as a regular recreational user—something that no Australian politician had so far been prepared to do. If I could convince a small percentage of the newspaper’s readers to vote for me, then it would be worth it. A week out from the election, it was published.
My main point in the piece was that there were 450,000 regular users of cannabis in Victoria that purchased more than $1 billion worth of weed every year. My second point was that more than 5000 of us are prosecuted every year simply for possessing it, many young kids who would carry a criminal prosecution for the rest of their lives just because they wanted to smoke a joint. The figures, I wrote, meant that we prosecuted people for possessing weed far more vigorously than we prosecuted for cocaine, and that this was an unwinnable war for the government. If I was elected, I would put forward a private member’s bill to legalise and tax cannabis at a rate of around 30 per cent and raise $250 million a year that could go to schools and hospitals, just as it had in Colorado.
A week out from the election on 29 November, I sensed that the Sex Party policies were finally being heard. Roy Morgan had shown that Family First’s vote had remained constant on about 2 per cent in polls taken in September, October and early November. Those same polls had showed zero support for the Sex Party, but then suddenly we were starting to attract 3 per cent of the vote. Sports-bet’s odds had us firming to win a seat from $6 to $1.87 in the final week. While it made me feel good I was pretty relaxed anyway by this point, confident that I had done about as much as I could to win. The Shooters Party were on $1.30 and Family First had blown out to $4 alongside Rise Up Australia. The DLP were on $6, while Vote 1 Local Jobs, Animal Justice and the Cyclists were all at $7, with the Rockers at $8. The Socialist Alliance were the rank outsiders at $51.
* * * *
On the morning of the election, I felt calm. I spent the day visiting polling booths and doing media. After the polls closed, Robbie, our volunteers and myself all descended on my favourite venue in Melbourne, the old-style gentlemen’s club with the modern agenda, The Kelvin Club. The early results were all over the place, but I was in party mode and not taking too much notice. By 10 p.m., I had moved ahead in Northern Metro and we were within striking distance in South Metro and South Eastern Metro. As the count went on over the next few days, my position got better and better. So did that of Rachel Carling-Jenkins from the DLP in the Western Region. In an interview with Fairfax, she said she was already looking around for fellow travellers on the crossbench but ruled out any alliance with the Sex Party. That would become ‘the battle of the blondes,’ she said.
Well, she was right in one respect, but in fact my real battle would be with another, older blonde from the Liberal Party—Inga Peulich. A few days after the election, with 60 per cent of the votes counted, News Limited reported that I was ‘on track to secure an upper house seat in the Victorian Parliament’. They used a photo of me in a scarlet dress with black fishnet stockings sitting reverse on a wing-back kitchen chair, a la Christine Keeler in the 1960s. I thought to myself that I should get used to this and not try to dodge it or start trying to act like ‘a politician’.
‘If elected’, the report stated, ‘Ms Patten said her first act would be to refer a voluntary euthanasia bill to the law reform commission. She hopes Labor and the Liberals will allow a conscience vote on the issue. Next on the list is drug reform. “I’m not there to stymie the government, I’m there to broaden debate,” she said.’
As the count went on over the next week, it became clear that barring a failure in the counting, I had won the last seat in Northern Metro. The formal declaration of the poll, however, would still need to be done by the VEC computers. Some of the seats were simply too tight to call and needed the computer breakdown to definitively award the seat. Our candidate for the South East Region, Martin Leahy, was still looking like he was ahead on most counting. Our Southern Metro candidate, Francesca Collins, was coming second, but well within striking distance.
At the push of the button, I was elected but Martin missed out by 250 votes. Francesca missed out by 1000. As disappointing as it was to not win three seats, I was over the moon with our result. Hardened party apparatchiks probably take it in their stride, but for little old me it was a life-changing moment. Robbie and I went home after the event and just sat on the couch looking at each other in disbelief. We had done it. Against all the odds and all the permutations of the preferencing system, against all the naysayers who said someone from the sex industry could never be elected to parliament—it had happened.
I resigned as CEO of Eros and started to look at a timetable for reform in the Victorian parliament. A good result at state level also renewed my faith in federal politics and the possibility of building the state result into a better one at the 2016 federal election.