Civil liberties party, take a seat

For the first time, a person representing a civil liberties political party is a Member of Parliament in Australia. What a different-sounding maiden speech the ASP’s Fiona Patten made!

Civil liberties party, take a seat

Maiden speech of Fiona Patten, Member of the Legislative Council of Victoria, representing the Australian Sex Party, the nation’s only civil liberties political group…delivered on 11 February 2015, as slightly edited*.

I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land and pay my respect to their elders.

I can’t believe how lucky I am to be representing as diverse a region as you will find anywhere in Australia and a melting pot for everything that is great about the state and its people. I have met people from the most diverse ethnic backgrounds. Indian, Tongan, Turkish, Greek, Vietnamese, Sudanese, Chinese, Afghan, Lebanese and so many more. Getting to know this large and exciting mix of cultures has only served to strengthen my conviction that ‘multiculturalism’ is one of the key drivers of social and economic growth.

I thank the voters for putting me in this place. We are a rapidly growing population screaming out for better services and infrastructure. As an independent I see my role is to champion the region and push government for these improvements. I am not sure how many of these problems I can solve but my door will always be open to discuss the issues. I promise.

I wish to thank those other minor parties whose preferences helped elect me. The Sex Party worked with, rather than against, other like-minded parties like the Voluntary Euthanasia Party, The Basics Rock and Roll Party and the Cyclists Party. I have already met with some of them to see how I can now help them achieve the goals they were hoping to kick at the election.

I would like to remember my parents – Ann and Rick Patten. My mother was British; some would say very British and my father was a very Australian naval officer. My father gave me that quality of not suffering fools lightly while my mother gave me the grace to be nice to them. I suspect that these traits will help me here.

I have only one regret about being elected and that is that neither Mum nor Dad is here to share the experience with me. My father died not long before the election and had been working hard on mastering the art of the ‘grumpy old man’. Whenever discussion turned to politicians, he transcended grumpy and became an absolute curmudgeon. This saw him feature regularly in the letters columns of the Canberra Times, complaining about local and federal politicians.

I come to this place via the road less travelled. I started my career as a young independent fashion designer with my own company, which I called Body Politics. It was during the ‘recession we had to have’ and I soon noticed that many of my best clients turned out to be sex workers. This led me to become an advocate for them and led to the successful decriminalisation of the industry. For a short time, I even ‘jumped the counter’ as they say in the industry. Indeed, I may be the first former sex worker to be elected to a parliament anywhere in this country – although no doubt the clients of sex workers have been elected in much greater numbers before me.

It was at this time that I really became interested in politics. I ran one of the first needle exchange programs in Canberra, saw the devastating effect of HIV and AIDS on my friends and realised the terrible discrimination that one’s sexuality can heap upon you. So it was 22 years ago that the failure of drug prohibition and the need for open discussion about sexual health became obvious to me and that government intervention was not always making things better.

During this time I sat on the board of a number of sexual health organisations including the Australian Federation of Aids Organisations before accepting an invitation to become the CEO of a new adult industry group – The Eros Association – a position in which I continued for over two decades.

Through my work I affirmed my belief that small business is the backbone of Australia’s economy. I owe a lot to the people of this industry. They showed me how groups of decent and average people can become marginalised and then demonised just because they dare to be different and stand outside the square. The adult sex industry is subject to the most appalling forms of discrimination from all sorts of people – politicians, business and union leaders, church clergy, certain feminists and social conservatives in the community – pretty much half its client base actually. It was this official hypocrisy that both fascinated and outraged me at the same time.

When Labor Senator Steven Conroy announced that we would have an internet filter in Australia, I decided that enough was enough. With help from the Eros Association and a few thousand voters who also thought this latest act of government censorship was a bridge too far, we decided to form a new party that would protect people’s civil liberties. And so the Sex Party was born.

Our agenda is said to be progressive like it’s something new, but in fact our issues are as old as the European invasion of this continent.

In Robert Hughes’ sprawling epic about the way Australia was colonised, The Fatal Shore, he records that, on the very first day the men and women of the First Fleet spent on Australian soil together, they indulged in a spectacular mass drunken orgy. On the second day, Governor Phillip read the first political statement on Australian soil, by reading out an official proclamation which contained, among other things, a threat to punish anyone who dared to behave as they had done the night before! And thus the prohibition around sex and drugs was written into the very fabric of Australian society, hanging around our necks like a dead albatross ever since.

My interest in sex, politics and feminism has strong roots through my mother, Ann Street’s, family. Mum’s great aunt was the celebrated Australian suffragette and feminist of the 1930s, Jessie Street. She ran for public office three times but never quite got there. I think Jessie would be very proud of the fact that a third of members in this chamber are women – although she would have been happier if it had been half. Jessie’s life and her work have been an inspiration to me and I’d like to think that my election to public office goes some way to acknowledging her efforts in early feminism and completing a chapter in the Street family story.

While I’m on the topic of political influences and mentors, I’d like to acknowledge the late Don Chipp, founder of the Australian Democrats for his friendship and advice. Especially in naming the Sex Party. “Call it something they’ll never forget”, he said to me not long before he passed away. And so I did. I would also like to acknowledge Malcolm Fraser’s old press secretary, David Barnett, as the first person to encourage me to set up a political party in an attempt to stop his friend and colleague, John Howard, from banning adult films. I just love people who break the mould.

My sister Kirsty and my brother Ian have been somewhat willing partners in this journey. It’s not always easy having a sister whose surname is firmly attached to a ‘sex party’. But they have been loyal siblings and fortunately agree with most things I say.

I would not be standing in this place today without my partner Robbie Swan. We met 22 years ago and have campaigned together for the whole of that time. Instead of having children we always joked that we had industry associations and political parties instead. Even though we have lived in separate states at times over the past 20 years, we are inseparable. The safety of this relationship has often allowed me to go out on a limb personally and professionally, which has often been necessary.

The Sex Party exists because, despite those thousands of letters written to MPs in Victoria and other states and territories, legislation on important social issues still does not align with public opinion. Polls show consistently that a large majority of the population want to see voluntary euthanasia legalised and yet neither of the major parties will move on it.

What is the matter with them? I suspect the reason they want people to endure gritty and excruciating deaths is to placate the religious lobby – I hope to help change that in my first term. I made a promise to a man many of you will know – Peter Short – a tireless campaigner on this issue who died but only a few weeks ago. I will uphold that promise and continue to press the need for laws that allow an individual to die with dignity.

I am also here to officially declare that the war on drugs has been and I intend to write a peace plan over the next year and submit it to the parliament. Hundreds of thousands of Victorian adults occasionally use marijuana as a social tonic in the same way that some of us in this chamber use beer or wine. Marijuana is no more dangerous than alcohol. So why are we, as a parliament, still sending people to jail for using it? It’s hypocritical and out of touch.

Banning drugs has not reduced their use. It has not reduced the harm caused by drug abuse. It has made a lot of criminals very, very rich. We must have a new approach.

We need to urgently regulate and make available medical cannabis. Whether it turns out to be the ‘new penicillin’ or not, there is so much evidence of its therapeutic application, that waiting around for committees and testing regimes will be counter-productive. Driven by parents who have seen how effectively it works on children with seizures and adults who experience how it helps chronic pain and alleviates the side effects of chemotherapy, the market place will not wait for politicians to drag their feet on this.

Victoria can and should supply this product under strict controls and regulations. We should create an industry that grows, manufactures and supplies this much needed product to assist in worldwide demand. But let’s do it before the grey market establishes its own protocols and we lose the ability to put in place world’s best practice.

I was raised as a nice young Anglican girl who attended church regularly and for a while, I dreamt of being a nun. That clearly didn’t work. I am now an avowed atheist who works toward separation of church and state. In my view the church punches well above its weight in most Australian parliaments. In 2000, I published a book called Hypocrites which listed all the church clergy in Australia who had been charged with a child sexual offence. The fallout included death threats and recriminations from religious MPs beyond my wildest imaginations.

In 2009, the Sex Party became the first party in Australia to officially call for a Royal Commission into child sex abuse in religious institutions, a policy of which I am still immensely proud. I applaud the Napthine government for its work on the Inquiry into the Handling of Child Abuse by Religious and Other Non-Government Organisations

I would also like to congratulate the Andrews’ government for establishing a Royal Commission into family violence and look forward to their recommendations being implemented…and quickly.

I intend to work in this parliament to ensure that no organisation, regardless of religious beliefs, should be exempted from the laws of discrimination that the rest of us are bound by. I also believe that religious organisations should pay the same taxes that the rest of us do and that the exhortation to ‘promote religion’, no longer confers on religious orders a government-sanctioned right to avoid paying tax.

I am committed to working with the fashion and textile industry in Victoria and especially in my electorate to ensure that this industry and the economic opportunities it brings are adequately fostered. Melbourne is Australia’s fashion capital and I believe it should be recognised as a global one in the same way our sister city of Milan is – by having a strong presence within government. More people visit Victoria to shop than for any other reason, even sport.

I stand before you today, not after a month long election campaign but after decades of fighting for what I believe in. I am the first Australian Sex Party representative elected to any parliament in this country. Our party has now come of age after years of developing a progressive policy platform that is as a diverse as our membership.

I will fight for every woman’s right to choose what they do with their own body and I will fight tooth and nail to protect current abortion laws in Victoria. I call on the government to work with me on providing safe buffer zones around centres that provide terminations so that women can freely access what is a legal right and not feel harassed and threatened by a small number of individuals who have no right to impose their views on women and their families as they go through what is a very personal experience.

It is not my intention to sit on the cross benches looking for ways to destabilise the government. I believe in stable government. The price payable by chronic instability becomes more obvious all the time. I am here to pursue my party’s agenda.

I will ensure freedom of speech is protected.
I firmly believe that our arts sector should be better nurtured.
I will stand for a sensible approach to the environment – one that balances the needs of business with the needs of humans.
I will work hard to further improve our public transport system.
I will stand together with the LGBITQ community to rid our system of inequality.
I will fight for better outcomes in the areas of mental and sexual health.
I believe that we owe it to our children to take a different approach to sex and relationship education in our schools.
I will continue – at every step I can – to ensure that everyone – no matter their sexual orientation, their gender, race, religion or colour is able to live the life they choose to live – without interference or prejudice.
I stand for freedom.

I look forward to working with all my colleagues in this place to bring about a better, fairer, prosperous and ultimately more progressive Victoria. Thank you.