Principle: an Attorney General’s first duty is always to create laws for the common good of all members of society.
The important word in that sentence is ‘all.’ Given that it is well known around the world that the approach to addressing the problem of prostitution promoted so vigorously by Attorney General Christian Porter and Premier Colin Barnett has failed spectacularly on every occasion where it has been implemented (Holland, Victoria, New South Wales to name just a few), it will not be much of a surprise if the legalised brothels in the suburbs Premier Barnett’s Government so dogmatically proposes are re-named Family Entertainment Centres.
Such an approach would be pretty much in keeping with the one thing that has become increasingly obvious duing the whole course of debate on the legalisation of prostitution in Western Australia: adamant denial on the part of Mr Porter of prostitution’s essential nature, therefore an incapacity to propose any real or effective solutions.
Wherever prostitution has been legalised in Australia and abroad its associated evils such as police corruption, increased control by criminal organisations and shocking examples of suburban violence have sprouted, hydra-like. The result has been tragic everywhere and good nowhere. It strongly tempts the formulation of a new verb for the English language. ‘To porterise’ may come to be defined as the adamant refusal to acknowledge all previous evidence to the contrary and to resolutely set one’s self on the path to failure.
The philosophical principle is simple. When one refuses to acknowledge or analyse the essence of any problem it becomes impossible to solve it. This is the primary flaw in the approach of Attorney General Christian Porter, the main architect of the current proposal to legalise prostitution. Subsequent attempts to redefine a problem out of existence (by, for example, legalising it) results in a delusional state and an even worse situation than before.
The primary problem with all prostitution, legal or illegal, which the Premier and the Attorney General have not acknowledged is that it is first and foremost a form of slavery which depends for its success on the physical, spiritual, psychological and sexual degradation of its victims and leads overwhelmingly to their destruction. This failure in basic diagnosis is one of the very disturbing aspects of Mr Porter’s push for legalisation as a solution.
The truth is that prostitution has been crying out for decades to be addressed and almost no-one has bothered to deeply analyse the nature of the problem and come to grips with its essence or to consider what might be done and how it might be gone about.
It is a disturbing aspect of Mr Porter’s whole approach that he has on at least one occasion publicly dismissed all other creative and innovative approaches that other countries have discovered actually short-circuit the traditional thorny problems of responding to prostitution. It really shows how banal politics can get.
Even worse, when speaking at a community forum last June Mr Porter announced that while he would seek community consultation he would, in any case, simply go ahead and legalise prostitution, regardless.
When families trying to lead a normal decent life in the suburbs have to avoid driving down streets in their own or nearby suburbs so that their children are not exposed to officially-sanctioned and legalised sexual exploitation as a socially acceptable reality, let them thank Mr Porter for the support that he gave them.
If drug-crazed bikies shoot dead strippers and prostitutes and anyone else happening to be standing around in the streets at the time or who, God-forbid, seeks to come to the aid of an injured person, let the Attorney General then explain defensively to journalists that it was not his fault that it happened, it was all really because his policy was never properly implemented in the first place.
When women and girls who have consistently suffered sexual abuse or marginalisation in their lives from the earliest ages conclude that they aren’t worth anything to anyone or to society other than as a purchasable good in a brothel where they are expected to ‘service’ as many as a dozen or more male customers a shift, let them write earnest letters of thanks to Mr Porter for his stunning and brilliant innovations in the interests of their daily happiness. And when such women and girls seek escape from the daily slavery and brutality that is the known reality of all prostitution – legal or illegal – in drug dependancy or in suicide, let us all bow in the direction of Mr Porter, the Great Helmsman.
When criminal thugs and low lifes see the business opportunities to be realised in the establishment of legal and illegal brothels (just as in Victoria and New South Wales where legalisation has resulted in a mushrooming of legal and illegal prostitution) and don’t care a fig for the misery and degradation they make their millions out of, let us all acknowledge the great and superior Government which obstinately dismissed all the known successes implemented by countries such as Sweden and Denmark (and a growing raft of other nations) and tell our children that because we did not really want to succeed, because we couldn’t be bothered to really solve this particular problem, we thought it best to choose the straightest path to failure because at least it sounded half-acceptable.
It is illuminating to reflect that when one scrutinises Mr Porter’s whole approach one detects that the beneficiaries of his proposed legislation all have one thing in common: none of them will be the women and girls forced by life’s tragedies into the barbarism and degradation of legal prostitution. It is a revealing omission.
Who will these (predominantly) women and girls be? By what name shall they be called? One might, at this point, turn to previous experience to give us some ideas in this regard.
One of the many tragedies of the Japanese militarist expansions of the 1930s and 40s, before and during the Second World War, was the phenomenon of an estimated 300,000 women lured, trapped or kidnapped into sexual servitude, often for more than a decade. The stories that have emerged of this human experience are, quite simply, heart-breaking. Imprisoned in ‘relief centres’ and described as ‘relief battallions’ such women and girls were sexually exploited repeatedly and suborned with barbaric indifference on a daily basis. The similarities between their experiences and everything studied and known about contemporary prostitution (legal or illegal) are numerous. So perhaps it might one day come to pass that a new term will enter the vocabulary in the State of Western Australia for a new underclass, persons whose lives are only of use to some people as purchases. Perhaps we could call them the Porter Girls. Perhaps we will come to call them Western Australia’s Comfort Women.