Coinciding with the opening of the Melbourne Sexpo, Eros – the Australian national adult industry association – has announced the launch of the Australian Sex Party, which it hopes will help to address the ‘nanny state’ policies of the main political parties. If you would like to support this Eros initiative, ABC Unleashed is currently running a poll where it is asking visitors to its website if they would ever consider joining such a party. The link to the poll is http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/
Eros CEO and party convenor, Fiona Patten, said the party was a sign of the times and an acknowledgement of the importance and scope of sexual issues in ordinary people’s lives these days. “People want their House of Reps members to balance the budget but increasingly they want their Senators to look after their rights and freedoms,” she said. “The Sex Party is the beginning of a new chapter in Upper House politics. The major parties will see that they can push industry groups around only so much.”
The Australian Sex Party is a sex and gender party that will run candidates in the next Senate election and in some state Upper House elections over the next few years. Its first priority would be to alert Australians to the unprecedented censorship of legal material that Senator Conroy’s proposed internet filtering scheme represents. “Senator Conroy’s plans actually threaten the existence of the Sex Party online which represents a real challenge to political free speech,” she said.
Ms Patten said that anti-sex politicians had managed to get themselves elected to key balance of power positions in the Senate and state Upper Houses for many years and had created a real climate of wowserism in Australian politics that was not shared by the community. “Community attitudes to sex and censorship have been shown over and over again by community opinion polling 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?”
She added that the party would coopt Australia’s 1,000 adult shops as individual branches of the party and the four million Australian adults identified in the 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.
“We also expect substantial support from the gay and lesbian community, retired people in nursing homes who are sick of being treated like children over sexual matters and also women who are sick of being excluded from politics under bogus ‘best candidate’ arguments”, she said.
You can find out more about the Australian Sex Party at www.sexparty.org.au
