YNOT – The Australian Sex Party has called on the country’s federal government to recall legislation that bans alcohol and pornography consumption among indigenous peoples in the Northwest Territories.
“The federal government continues to maintain that Aborigines rape little children because they cannot contain their urges when they watch sexual media,” ASP chief Fiona Patten said. “That is the underlying assumption in banning porn as part of the Intervention.”
The Intervention is a colloquial term for legislation officially named Northern Territory Emergency Response. Enacted in 2007, the controversial measure comprises a package of changes to welfare provision, law enforcement, land tenure and other sectors. Bans on alcohol and pornography consumption are key components. The government maintains the law addresses “rampant” child sexual abuse and neglect in Aboriginal communities, based on unrelated data contained in an independent study. The Intervention is supported in some quadrants and decried as racist in others.
“[The law] was made without any research being conducted into sexual assault and availability of pornography in Aboriginal communities,” Patten said. “It was made against the express wishes of the authors of the Little Children Report and it was part of a racial slur that Aborigines could not only not hold their grog, but they couldn’t hold their porn either. There was no evidence of this ever produced, and there [still] isn’t any.”
Instead of protecting children, which is a laudable goal in any society, the Intervention instead introduces racism by ignoring what Patten called “a huge personal freedom issue inherent in the right to watch adult entertainment that goes way beyond a moral debate over sex.”
“The laws on adult media need to be policed and upheld [in the Northern Territories] as they are in other parts of the state like Darwin, rather than introducing racist bans on adult media,” Patten said. “The Little Children Report identified R-rated pay-TV porn as the problem in the NT, by virtue of the fact that it was ‘available 24 hours a day.’ [Former Prime Minister] John Howard then banned X-rated DVDs instead and even failed to investigate claims that pay-TV stations offered package deals with sporting channels in the NT that included free adult channels.
“The ban on porn should be repealed immediately, and the gross and insulting signs that are up in Aboriginal communities in the NT that allege they watch porn and then rape children should be torn down,” added.
“When racism is covered with a layer of sexual innuendo like this, it causes racism to be more deeply ingrained than it otherwise would be. It is a disgraceful situation that [Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs] Jenny Macklin has seen fit to back John Howard’s overtly racist attack by not repealing these laws when she first became minister.”
For more about the Australian Sex Party, a recognized political party, visit SexParty.org.au.
