Shared from the 2/23/2022 The Age eEdition

Labor’s liberal streak leaves opposition flailing

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This month state Parliament voted to decriminalise sex work: a milestone I almost missed amid COVIDnormal swinging into gear.

We might call decriminalisation another ambitious reform from the Andrews government, even if NSW and the Northern Territory already have similar laws. It is not always the case that Victoria acts first on progressive legislation, but it acts so often I can’t think of a social cause the state Labor Party doesn’t own, from Indigenous treaty-making and ‘‘truth-telling’’ to resisting Canberra’s religious freedom agenda.

And then there is the infuriating heavy-handedness on some pandemic health measures.

Excuse the sudden change in tone: as I was writing this column news lobbed in about the government lifting mask mandates in most Victorian indoor settings. But while office workers get to breathe the airconditioned air, primary school children from year 3 onwards – children at relatively low risk of catching COVID and getting sick from it, and at relatively high risk of long-term psychological disorders from the extended absence of face-to-face schooling during the past two years – still need masking because their vaccine rates are lagging.

Anyway, back to a very Victorian spectator sport: watching opposition parties flail and scramble as the government covers the social policy field.

Decriminalising sex work, a battle 40 years in the making, finally became a reality after Fiona Patten, MP for the Reason Party, formerly known as the Sex Party, led the charge with a 2019 parliamentary review. The new laws repeal offences for consensual sex work between adults. They gradually dismantle an expensive and onerous licensing regime that stigmatises sex workers as a dangerous species of taxpayer, naturally diseased (never mind the illogicality of this being bad for business) and best confined to brothels in dimly lit, industrial corners of town. That’s what legitimacy has looked like for sex workers in Victoria.

Meanwhile, the illegal street walkers in St Kilda and elsewhere testify to a broken system. Vulnerable to prosecution, reluctant to report violence to police and confronting discrimination in everything from housing to health, sex workers have been long deprived of basic dignity.

The sex work decriminalisation bill bans soliciting near schools, childcare services and places of worship when people are worshipping. Otherwise, sex work is regulated with no more zeal than other work.

Opposition Leader Matthew Guy said the Coalition opposed the bill because it opened up every ‘‘suburban’’ house to becoming a brothel.

To which the radically inclined feminist – such as me – says: the suburbs already facilitate the sex trade, in the form of the ‘‘traditional’’ heterosexual marriage, so why the fuss?

More to the point: the opposition is attacking a free-enterprise reform. As Patten pointed out – only half tongue-in-cheek – the bill is about cutting red tape for small business. Many Andrews government policies wedge the ‘‘classic’’ small-l liberal because they affirm the right of individuals to liberate themselves from stifling norms. The right to get an abortion, which includes the right not to be harassed by activists outside the clinic. The right to live authentically, which underpins the ‘‘gay’’ conversion therapy ban and self-ID laws allowing people to change the gender on their birth certificate. The right to die with dignity.

As to Labor’s left-field opponents, I’m reminded that for the past two elections (but not for the one coming up), the Greens’ candidate for Richmond, Kathleen Maltzahn, had her own principled opposition to liberalising the sex trade.

She advocated the ‘‘Swedish model’’, which criminalises the buyers of sex but not the sellers. The model has spread beyond Nordic countries to France, Northern Ireland, Iceland and Canada. It rests on the idea that in a patriarchal society, prostitution is just another form of male oppression against women.

I find this unconvincing: patronising towards women and ineffective because it would merely drive the trade underground, further endangering sex workers. It is nonetheless striking how comprehensively its proponents have been sidelined in sexual politics debates in recent years despite the persistent epidemic of sexual violence and the endless commodification of women’s bodies on the internet.

There is a lot of lawmaking. But is there enough public debate about the law?

Julie Szego is a regular columnist.

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