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