All over Australia, advocates of “sex work” campaign for reduced government intervention in sex industry operations in the name of removing “stigma” from “sex workers.” In this approach, deregulation is a means of humanizing sex workers, because it affords them the dignity of work and individual agency. Unlike the workforces of other industries, less rather than more government regulation is believed to deliver those rights.
The Queensland government has recently joined its eastern seaboard counterparts and started efforts to deregulate the business of prostitution in that state as well.
[T]he Queensland government, in its Terms of Reference drafted for the Commission’s work, included the requirement that it must “limit … the administrative and resource burden on government and industry.”
Cheap and expedient solutions to problems of female sex trading is an unexpected aim of Queensland’s Labor government, especially given the sex slavery case uncovered in Brisbane last year, but it’s a neoliberal aim that infects nearly all governments in Australia.
This contradiction in the official Australian response to commercial verses non-commercial forms of sexual abuse and exploitation has long puzzled many (though certainly not all) feminists. Recently, two feminist organizations — Collective Shout and the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women Australia — joined forces to see whether Australia’s media was contributing to the lopsidedness.
The “Side Hustles and Sexual Exploitation” report finds that journalists “push for full decriminalization as a legislative solution” to problems associated with prostitution, and fail to mention, let alone describe, alternative policy models that attempt to reduce the size of the sex industry by criminalizing sex buyers and through educating the public about prostitution’s harms in the style of Australia’s “respectful relationships” program.
Source: Queensland wants to deregulate the sex industry because it’s cheaper not because it’s ‘safer’
It is not about regulating more or less intensity. What needs to be done is to abolish prostitution, penalizing pimps and users of prostitution and giving social and professional outlets to its victims: prostituted women.