The Australian Sex Party enjoyed a rejuvenation of sorts at the recent Higgins by-election, securing 3.3% of the vote, but nothing could beat the PR bonanza flowing head-honcho Fiona Patten’s way in recent days over two apparently pressing porn issues.

Two weeks ago, Patten issued a curious statement through sex industry lobbyists the Eros Association stating that the good regulators at the Australian Classification Board had banned the practice of “squirting” in porn films because it didn’t believe the practice of female ejaculation was real. Under current guidelines, takes the film out of the acceptable X category and into the realms of a fetish, potentially drawing the ire of Customs and other heavy-handed government operatives like Stephen Conroy.

The mainstream media, riffing off a related controversy about the banning of small breasts, snapped up the story this morning with the prestigious National Times leaping into to cyberspace on the “Weird politics of small boobs and bodily fluids”.

On Wednesday, the Sex Party, building on the momentum, issued this press release over an apparent Australian Classification Board ruling that a-cup models that looked under-age would automatically refused classification.

The code, and various state laws, include a long-time clause that nude models who “appear to be” under 18 are automatically refused classification.

In clarifying comments to Crikey, Patten said she had attended an information session at ACB headquarters last year in which screenshots from several productions were shown as examples of when the censor would step in. At the meeting, “the underdeveloped nature of the model’s breasts was cited as a reason for the image to be refused classification numerous times.”

Of course, it’s no coincidence that the stoush is occurring against the backdrop of activism Stephen Conroy’s naughty blacklist and the current “Internet Blackout” campaign.

The Sex Party argues that the consequence of the laws in cyberspace would be the banning of not only websites that host the material, but those that link to them — ruling out a large proportion of the sin-obsessed industry’s massive online presence.

The local stoush follows a seven-year controversy over the practice of “squirting” in the United Kingdom. Last September, after years of pressure from “feminist” filmmaker and Daily Sport columnist Anna Span, the British Board of Film Classification relented and allowed the practice to appear in Span’s DVD ‘Women Love Porn’. The fact that male ejaculation is normally allowed lead some local bloggers to accuse the censors of double standards.

Source: http://www.crikey.com.au/

The old political war-horse Fred Daly wrote that in 1944 there was a large reception to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary in politics of Billy Hughes, member for Bradfield, past Prime Minister and prolific political turn-coat. John Curtin, presiding, said “Billy.....why is it that you have been in almost every party in Australia except the Country Party ? “    Hughes replied, “Good God, man, you have to draw the line somewhere.”

Although far less colourful a character the newest member for Bradfield, Paul Fletcher, drew a new line when he chose to totally ignore the existence of the newly created Australian Sex Party (ASP).  In his online survey voters are asked specifically what party they support. It then lists them, strategically placing Christian Democrats and One Nation prominently at the top of the list next to the coalition parties. The Sex Party doesn’t even get a look in. There isn’t even a section for “Other Parties”.

Even allowing for WASP sensitivities it is the political equivalent of a cold shower. Maybe they had already decided that only Labor voters have sex.
In a field of 22 candidates Marianne Leishman of the Sex Party polled third. In a cynical abuse of the electoral system, Fred Nile’s Christian Democrats ran a total of nine candidates. Two of them were at the top of the ballot sheet. Discounting the donkey vote Leishman beat all the nine Christian Democrats combined.

The results of the by-election are telling. The ASP achieved a primary vote of 3.3 % in one of the most conservative blue-ribbon seats in the country. Consider however some of the booth returns. In one large booth in Lindfield, the heartland of the electorate and literally a stone throw from the local Liberal offices, the Sex Party received 4.92% of the vote.

But it was in the north and southern parts of the electorate that whole swathes of booths returned well for the ASP.  The largest booth in Chatswood recorded a 5.15% vote. Booths in the north recorded votes around and in excess of 4.5%.
Peter Hartcher ( “Even sex sells when Labor plays cheap and nasty” SMH December 7, 2009) says that there were three winners in Saturdays by-election, “..... the Liberals and the Greens can plausibly claim success. And so can the Australian Sex Party.”

Whether or not the vote for the Sex Party holds up when Labor does run a candidate is yet to be tested.
New South Wales is certainly fertile territory for the Sex Party. Many of the issues on the party’s agenda are state based and include sex education in schools, legalisation of non-violent erotica and abortion.

The 2011 NSW elections will be interesting. It will be a choice between a government seriously on the nose, led by the avowed Catholic Kristina Keneally, versus a barely competent Opposition led by the particularly un-sexy Barry O’Farrell.

Given the result in Bradfield it is fair to assume that in such a state election the Sex Party could pick up an even higher percentage of libertarian and disaffected voters.  This could have real implications in seats like Menai (ALP 2.7% ) and Camden (3.9%). A concerted campaign within the means of the Sex Party could be waged in the gaggle of Central Coast seats marginally held by Labor including Gosford (4.9%), The Entrance (4.9%) and Wyong (6.9%).

Then there are the Bolshie seats like Balmain and Marrickville that are threatening to swing from Labor to the Greens.
The Liberals and Religious Right can ignore the political landscape as much as they want. At the end of the day politics is a lot like sex. Often it all comes down to preferences.

by Mark Anthony

WHAT HAVE WE HERE?The Australian Sex Party's candidate in the Higgins byelection on Saturday, Fiona Patten, may lodge an official complaint with the Australian Electoral Commission after she was detained by Victorian police on the morning of the poll. Patten gained an impressive 3.27 per cent of the vote but had a hard time convincing local police that she was a candidate. She was pulled over and detained for 30 minutes as she began her rounds of the polling booths early on Saturday morning after two complaints from parents that the Sex Party van she was travelling in along Toorak Road was offensive. ''I explained that I was a candidate in the byelection,'' Patten said yesterday. ''But they didn't seem to be aware there was one.'' In Bradfield, the party achieved a similar result - without police intervention - reporting that its candidate, pole dancer Marianne Leishman, aka Zahra Stardust, was most popular in booths at Chatswood Public School and Lindfield, both of which accounted for 5 per cent of the party's overall vote in the seat.

SEAN NICHOLLS AND LEESHA MCKENNY
December 8, 2009
smh.com.au
National

SEX sells. So here's a dark horse for the next federal election. It's a new political party, and unless you were a voter in the Higgins or Bradfield by-elections over the weekend, you probably haven't heard of it yet.

It's a party that stands for equality and social justice, for civil liberties and for freedom of choice.

In the leafy electorate of Bradfield on Sydney's north shore, where more than 20 candidates vied for what is a very safe Liberal Party seat, it attracted the third-highest primary vote of the field.

We're talking about the Australian Sex Party; a political grouping with a policy platform not nearly as racy as its name might suggest. Think of it as libertarian rather than libertine.

In both Bradfield and Higgins it received just shy of 3.3 per cent of the primary vote.

This may not sound like a lot, but these by-elections were dominated by two big federal issues; that of the federal Liberal Party leadership, and the national angst over what to do (if anything) about the fact that summers seem to be getting hotter.

Other issues such as censorship in Australia, gender equality, sex education and a woman's right to choose have not exactly been hot news of late. Nor do minor parties or Independents usually tend to fare well in federal Lower House seats.

In the Senate it is a different story, as the Family First's Steve Fielding and anti-pokies Independent Nick Xenophon would demonstrate.

And should the Government decide to call a double-dissolution election next year, remember that just 7.7 per cent of the vote secures a Senate seat.

The ASP, which was born out of adult industry lobby group the Eros Foundation, is headed by Fiona Patten, the charismatic and articulate chief executive of Eros, and a veteran campaigner on issues such as censorship, gender equality and discrimination.

These areas of social policy are likely to come to the fore again soon. For a start, federal Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is sitting on a potential bomb in the form of a report into trials of mandatory internet filtering in Australia. In mid-October he told a Senate committee he had received the report from Enex Testlabs, which would be released for public consultation "as soon as is practicable".

That was six weeks ago, so the cynical among us could be forgiven for wondering just how sanitised the document will be when it finally emerges.

The last I heard on the subject was reports on information technology websites that late last month, before the report's release, that Australian Christian Lobby head Jim Wallace was granted a private meeting with Conroy to discuss the filtering trial.

As it is we still don't even know what will and won't be censored, or by how much internet speeds will be slowed down by filtering the web at an Internet Service-Provider level (which is not a good look for a government trying to develop a high-speed national broadband network).

Here the ASP is adamant it will do everything humanly possible to rid Australia of this Orwellian threat and leave internet censorship as the responsibility of parents and individual users.

This is an issue which has already sparked public demonstrations and a storm of online protest. It is a vote-changer.

Personally speaking, I will never vote for any party that wants to implement the electronic equivalent of book-burning. Sorry Kevin.

The election of Tony Abbott to the Liberal leadership also bodes well for the ASP in terms of social policy issues such as abortion law and same sex marriages.

In terms of abortion, when the deeply conservative former Catholic seminarian was health minister he managed to alienate (not for the first time, I'd guess) a large proportion of Australia's female population by banning the abortion drug RU486.

This prompted the wonderful admonition from Greens Senator Kerry Nettle, who told Abbott to "keep your rosaries off my ovaries".

On that front, the ASP's Fiona Patten is particularly concerned about the growing influence of religion in mainstream politics, citing as a case in point Kevin Rudd's increasingly frequent doorstop press conferences outside his church, not to mention the likes of the Christian Lobby's recent private briefing with the Communications Minister.

Another thing to take into account when assessing the future electoral prospects of the ASP is the marketing and communications firepower that Eros has. For a start the foundation has literally hundreds of thousands of voters on its X-rated video mailing list. Then there is the potential to reach the millions of Australians who access adult web sites or order sex toys or erotica online.

When it comes to direct marketing, that's pretty well targeted.

But the last word to Fiona Patten: "We don't want to restrict what adults do as long as they don't hurt others."

Seems pretty reasonable to me.

Source: http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,26453006-27197,00.html