Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens, as everybody in this chamber will be extremely well aware by now, oppose the Northern Territory intervention. I articulated our concerns about the elements of these amendments in both the minority report that the Greens submitted to the committee inquiry and during my speech in the second reading debate. We have some concerns about the workability of these issues. We have been, however, very clear in our support for the fact that these amendments are not exempt from the RDA. I made that very clear. So you can take it as read we will not be supporting the amendment from the opposition that puts this back under an exemption from the RDA.

As I said in our minority report and in my speech, at the moment there are an estimated 50 households in prescribed communities that may be viewing R18+ programs—50 houses in 73 communities. So we are talking about a small number of households that have access to this material. Secondly, if Senator Scullion had been at the two committee hearings we had on this, he would have had a demonstration from the pay TV people, who showed us the very detailed process you go through to get access to these programs. I do not want one person to go away from this place saying, ‘The Greens support pornography into these communities.’ We do not support the transmission of this material. However, as was pointed out on a number of occasions, there are very small numbers involved, there is a quite complicated process of excluding this, in terms of the narrowcasting, and we question the efficiency of going down this route.

We would prefer to see the expense that is used here invested in, for example—as we articulated previously—education about access to this material, education for parents about exposing their children to these sorts of materials, and working with the Northern Territory government to provide more counselling services. For example, you can go up to Darwin, where this material is not banned—and the evidence we received during the committee hearings was that people are going up to Darwin and doing this—and access DVDs that are far more pornographic than the R18+ programs that we are talking about regulating here.

However, while we think that this legislation is going to a lot of trouble to regulate a low level of access to this material, when there is far worse material that people have access to, and would prefer to see the limited resources we have for dealing with these issues spent elsewhere, we will not be opposing these amendments, however unworkable we think they are. We support the government for the small step that they have taken in not requiring these to be exempt from the RDA. We will not be supporting any of the opposition amendments that seek to make these subject to exemption from the RDA and we will not be supporting amendment (1), which takes away appeals to the AAT.