The Australian Sex Party’s website has been attracting major interest from Muslim and Middle Eastern countries over the past couple of months. Of the site’s top 10 referring countries, Indonesia ranked 3rd, Egypt ranked 4th, Pakistan rated 6th , Malaysia was 7th and Turkey was 9th.

The Sex Party site will have had 400,000 unique visitors for the month of February and now has the top ranking on a Google global search of the word ‘sex’. Google searches over a billion sites to arrive at this result and the Sex Party did no specific promotion or search engine optimization to achieve the number one spot. It was all driven by an interest in sex and politics.

Alexa global rankings this month show the Sex Party’s website outperforming the ALP, Liberal and Greens sites by a huge margin on the world stage.

Sex Party president, Fiona Patten, said that although many overseas visitors came to the site for the novelty value of a political party with sex in its name, serious students of democracy in other countries were well aware that one of the main hallmarks of a democratic state was its willingness to accept and tolerate sex and pornography as legal products and services. “In most of the Muslim countries now experiencing the winds of democratic change, pornography and sex are strictly outlawed”, she said. “In Iran we have recently seen a man condemned to death for running a porn web site. The notion that people in the adult industry can actually start and be part of a registered political party, is an aspect of democracy that it fascinating to those in countries where many aspects of sexuality are still dictated by the state”.

Ms Patten said that the party’s site was still banned by over active filters in many government and non government organisations throughout Australia. Senator Conroy’s department, the Canberra Times, some Victorian government agencies and the Virgin lounge have all banned employees from accessing the Sex Party’s site at various times. “We still have emails to party members bouncing because their filters pick up the words ‘sex’ and ‘party’ together and come up with something entirely different from a registered political party”, she said. “Internet filters are still very clumsy and if they can’t distinguish between an orgy and a registered political party with serious policies and public funding, of what value are they?”.