Morals campaign 'worse than Joh's'
By Dave Riley
BRISBANE — A state government plan to tap telephones and arrest suspects without warrants has been labelled as more draconian than any legislation during the era of Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
At the centre of the outcry is draft legislation to give police the power to arrest without warrant anyone found in a brothel. Queensland Council for Civil Liberties president Terry O'Gorman has called the widening of police powers absurd and hypocritical.
Linked to the new legislation is a further plan to introduce wire tapping, supposedly to catch the "Mr Bigs" of the sex industry.
The new legislation sits uncomfortably with the oft cited Fitzgerald process. Prostitution and SP bookmaking were the sources of police corruption publicly paraded during that inquiry. Subsequent investigation by the Criminal Justice Commission produced a well-documented report arguing for decriminalisation and regulation of the industry through health professionals and the Health Department, not through the police.
The legislation marks a new phase in the government's bid to wipe out organised prostitution. But defining a brothel as a place operated by more than one prostitute legalises sex workers who work from home.
As one sex worker was quoted as saying, this "will force many sex workers into these more dangerous home set-ups where they will be alone and have no protection because if they hire a bodyguard or have a friend there, it automatically becomes a brothel".
Meanwhile, Madonna's book, Sex, faces a ban in Queensland under the Classification of Publications Act due to be proclaimed shortly. Some 1500 copies have already been sold throughout Queensland, but because the Commonwealth censor has now classed it as a restricted category one publication, it will automatically be banned in the state.