The Independent Sex Party candidate for South Toowoomba in Saturday’s election, says that her social agenda for Toowoomba could transform the electorate, to make it a progressive model for the rest of Queensland.

Charlene Phillips said censorship laws needed to be relaxed in Queensland and if elected, she would fight for the legalisation of X18+ films. “Two large academic studies and the latest industry statistics have now confirmed that over one third of Toowoomba residents buy adult goods and products”, she said. “Both major parties and even Bob Katter have all said they will continue to keep Queensland’s censorship laws at a far more restrictive level than all the other Australian states. This means they are committed to continuing the ‘Nanny’ state in Queensland with the same censorship policies that were in place under the Bjelke Petersen administration.”

Ms Phillips said that many parents in Toowoomba were not educated to understand sex on the internet and called for government-funded community education classes to teach parents on how to advise and supervise their children on line. “The Australian Law Reform Commission has recently recommended a number of sweeping changes to the way in which we classify and regulate content on the internet”, she said. “They want the state governments to cede their enforcement powers to create a truly national classification scheme instead of the piecemeal nanny-state system we have here in Queensland. I’m challenging the major parties to say that they will accept the spirit of these new recommendations and will work with federal government to implement them in Queensland”.

The Sex Party also wants adult shops and brothels to be subjected to the same planning and advertising conditions as other similar businesses like doctor’s surgeries and newsagents. “The rise of illegal brothels in Queensland is directly attributable to the amount of red tape and legislative control that accompanies a license. Why do brothels need twice as many toilets as the state parliament, per capita?”

She also wants to establish a licensing scheme for Queensland’s adult shops to stop children suing adult shop owners who throw them out of their shops for being underage.

She called on civil libertarians to resist the call to ban Bob Katter’s homophobic ads saying that free speech was the overriding issue and that homophobia needed to be met with intelligent arguments and love.