Page 370 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 21 February 1990
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movies to the areas of Hume, Fyshwick and Mitchell - to the industrial areas of Canberra. The idea of this restriction is to minimise the usage of both X-rated and R-rated movies. I will come back to that point later.
This Bill deals with principles. The Government, I feel, should be prepared to allow business the time to move premises. It would be incredibly unfair to pass a Bill like this, then immediately gazette it, so that a businessman suddenly loses his business because he cannot operate in Belconnen or somewhere like that, and does not have time to rearrange it. That particularly applies to the people who are currently hiring out R-rated movies, because they are part and parcel of the video business.
Let us not forget that most of those video shops usually have one person running and operating them and, from my observation on the relatively minimal number of times - three or four in the last two or three years - I have been in those shops, they have almost always been operated by people who are under 18 years of age or appear to be under 18 years of age. So there is also a difficulty there.
I think that the notion should also require that operators be licensed, and the Government should consider that the licensing of operators would particularly allow the separation, in Fyshwick, Mitchell and Hume, of X- and R-rated outlets. We certainly would not wish to see a situation where R-rated operators were hiring out movies next to X-rated operators because then we would have what the censor is trying to restrict - a combination, in effect, of violence and erotica. I believe that everybody in this chamber agrees with the censor that that is undesirable.
My main reason for doing this, and for claiming that this is a rational and logical move, is related to prohibition. Prohibition simply does not work. The best example, of course - and I have referred to this on many occasions - is alcohol in America in the 1920s. But I think a much more current example is the drug wars in the United States where we know that for every dollar spent the problem increases proportionately. So we have to find some form of policy that will allow us to minimise the usage of R-rated and X-rated movies; to minimise the usage of what many members of our society consider undesirable.
A psychiatrist from Merseyside, Liverpool, in the United Kingdom, Dr John Marks, has recently referred to "the paradox of prohibition". At the same time he is working on an idea that is being developed by Dr Stephen Mugford, a sociologist at the Australian National University. These men are looking at the economic demand curve, and the notion of that curve is that when you free up something and take a totally laissez-faire attitude to it, so that there is free advertising and so forth - what Stephen Mugford calls a "Mars bars" approach - you get an increased usage because, as Mr Stevenson pointed out when he tabled his Bill, advertising has a major impact.
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