The Sex Party candidate for the seat of Niddrie, Amy Myers, claims that thousands of Victorian workers are being discriminated against because of their job or occupation and the major parties are doing nothing about it.

Ms Myers said that in the Niddrie area, used car salesmen, journalists, sex workers, real estate agents, butchers, priests and even politicians are being subjected to unfair discrimination on the basis of their jobs and/or occupation. “These people need to be protected from bigoted and narrow-minded types who refuse to provide them with goods and services or in other ways threaten the quality of their lives or even their safety simply because of the job they do. “Priests are suffering abuse in the street and religious door-knockers are reporting more abuse when doing charity work on the basis of record numbers of sexual assaults in the church. While this is a major problem that the church has to deal with, not all priests are paedophiles and the occupation of religious instructor now needs to be protected”.

She said that used car salesman and real estate agents had long been the butt of jokes that sometimes flowed over into denial of service. Sex workers and people who worked in adult shops suffered more. “Victoria needs an amendment to its discrimination laws to allow people to take an action for unfair discrimination on the grounds of job, occupation, profession or calling. Because people cannot discriminate on the grounds of ethnicity, gender, religion or political persuasion, it narrows the areas on which you can slag someone off or deny them their natural rights. Job and occupation are increasingly becoming that focus”.