Alan Cadman (Mitchell, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too want to pay tribute to the member for Makin for her capacity to raise difficult issues in the parliament and to truly represent the people in her electorate. I have visited her electorate many times and the way in which Trish Draper is regarded by the people who live in Adelaide—she is just a legend—must be seen to be believed. She has contact with all levels of her community and they all respect, appreciate and like her. A few do not vote for her, but they should. I think if she stayed there a little longer she would persuade more to vote for her than currently do.

Trish has taken up causes relating to women and children, particularly young children, and to the prospect of the abuse of young children. I think my first introduction to her courage in this situation was when the House was considering changes to the classification of films and television. Trish played a role in bringing forward some horrible films that really were pornographic and that related to the abuse of children, and she was courageous in drawing the attention both of this House and of the Attorney-General at the time, Daryl Williams, to the problems he was creating by refusing to classify certain films, which I will not name, in a way that would have completely restricted their use.

Trish sought always to protect the safety of women and children, and today we have the federal government seeking to protect the lives and ways of women and children in the Northern Territory’s Indigenous community—taking strong steps to ban pornographic material, taking strong steps to make sure that classifications in the Northern Territory are observed and that material is removed. The Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, is going after anything he can to make sure that pornography and the abuse of children does not continue in Indigenous communities. But here in this city, in Canberra, it is being created. It is being created in this territory to go to another territory.

The government will take action against the Northern Territory, but another area where action needs to be taken is in the general area of classifications. The waffle that the former Attorney-General Daryl Williams put up has made it very difficult for classifiers. It is such an open and undefined area that I would hate to be a classifier because you are always going to be wrong; you are going to be too harsh or too easy on material placed before you. The lack of clarity in SCAG, the meeting of Attorneys-General of Australia, was in my view a detrimental step. Before he retired Minister Williams said that if the scheme proved to be more open under his regime he would change it. He never had that opportunity. I do not know whether he had any intention of doing so, but his statement at the time was that he would review the classification of film and television.

Is this a prudish approach? No. Some may think that of me, but I think that adults have a right to watch material even though it may be destructive of their minds. I find it destructive, from the glimpses I have had of it. I do not like it one little bit. I find it extremely difficult to scrub it from my consciousness. I assume that everybody is somewhat the same, although some seem impervious to it—but not the Indigenous community, because night after night, day after day, they have been watching pornographic material and abuse of children—

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