Eros Launches The Australian Sex Party

Amidst a rapidly changing political landscape and an increasing resistance to ‘nanny state’ politics, Australia’s national adult industry association will today announce details of a new force in the Australian political landscape - the Australian Sex Party.

The party launch will be held in conjunction with the opening of Sexpo, Thursday 20th Nov, at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre.

Eros CEO and party convenor, Fiona Patten, said the party was a sign of the times and an acknowledgement of the importance and scope of sexual issues in ordinary people’s lives these days. “People want their House of Reps members to balance the budget but increasingly they want their Senators to look after their rights and freedoms”, she said. “The Sex Party is the beginning of a new chapter in Upper House politics.”

The party is a sex and gender party that will run candidates in the next Senate election and in some state Upper House elections over the next few years. Its first priority would be to alert Australians to the unprecedented censorship of legal material that Senator Conroy’s proposed internet filtering scheme represents. “Senator Conroy’s plans actually threaten the existence of the Sex Party online which represents a real challenge to political free speech”, she said.

Ms Patten said that anti-sex politicians had managed to get themselves elected to key balance of power positions in the Senate and state Upper Houses for many years and had created a real climate of wowserism in Australian politics that was not shared by the community. “Community attitudes to sex and censorship have been shown over and over again by community opinion polling to be more relaxed than ever and yet in politics, the opposite is the case. When was the last time you heard a politician say something positive about sex?”

She said the party would co-opt Australia’s 1,000 adult shops as individual branches of the party and the four million Australian adults identified in the La Trobe University’s Sex in Australia survey (2006) who regularly purchased X rated films, vibrators, adult books and lingerie, would make up its initial audience.

She said that discrimination against sex industry workers and companies was rife in the community and that the party would work to replicate ACT laws which outlawed job and occupation discrimination. “The Victorian government and the Melbourne Exhibition Centre Board have thrown Sexpo out of the MEC next year because they don’t want to offend overseas countries who are shy around sex and want to hire another part of the building”, she said. “Why should 70,000 ordinary Victorians miss out on their show because 100 Indonesian dentists or a thousand Iranian potters want the building. Its discrimination on the basis of profession and occupation and it should not be allowed to happen in a free country.”

Australian Sex Party: PO Box 181, Deakin West, ACT, 2600. Ph 02 6285 247