Rowan Henderson:

Yuma everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the National Library of Australia tonight. My name is Rowan Henderson and I'm an assistant director of curatorial and collection research here at the National Library. It's wonderful to have you with us for what and no doubt will be an engaging and memorable uncovering of some of the history behind the Australian Sex Party. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, the traditional custodians of the land on which we're gathering today. I pay my respects to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people joining us tonight. Our First Nations people were the first keepers of stories, culture and history, and it's their legacy that the library continues today. So Canberra's a politically savvy town. So no doubt many of you know tonight's guests and they'll need no introduction.

But to those who have yet to experience the delights of Robbie and Fiona and hearing them speak, let me give you an overview. Robbie Swan is a former national magazine editor, turned political strategist and longtime advocate for free speech and civil liberties. He's the co-founder of the Australian Sex Party, leading national campaigns for Australia's adult industry. He spent more than 25 years navigating the complex intersection of sex, politics, and censorship. Robbie brings decades of frontline experience lobbying governments, shaping policy and of challenging moral and political hypocrisy. Fiona Patten is a pioneering activist and former politician who made history as the first former sex worker elected to public office. As co-founder of the Australian Sex Party, she served nearly a decade in the Victorian Parliament driving progressive reforms across equality, health and civil liberties. So I first met Robbie back in 2014 when I was curating an exhibition at the Canberra Museum and Gallery.

The show explored the why behind Canberra's reputation for the three Ps, pollies, porn and pyrotechnics.

Robbie's collection relating to the ACT's X-rated film industry was a key part of the exhibition coming to fruition. And while curating the exhibition, he regaled me with many of the anecdotes that are now documented in his latest book, which we are here to launch and I had the delight of reading over the weekend. Robbie's been kind enough to contribute to the National Library's collection as well with the library holding his papers and oral history recorded in 2004 and now of course, I hope he has given us a copy of his newest book through our legal deposit scheme. I'll check up on that, Robbie. Now, Robbie and Fiona have put together a PowerPoint to accompany tonight's in conversation and we do want to advise that it does contain some images featuring nudity and sexual acts, which some viewers may find offensive. However, I'm sure that Robbie's reputation precedes him.

So you might've suspected this when you signed up to come along tonight. I have no doubt that tonight's conversation part memoir, part social history, part trip down memory lane will be funny, honest, and insightful. So please join me in welcoming Robbie and Fiona as they discuss censorship battles, moral crusades, unlikely friendships, and political absurdities, and reveal the human side of an often misunderstood industry.

Fiona Patten:

Darling. It's going to be like that tonight. I'm not rushing you, I'm rushing him. But thank you. Thank you all for being here. It's amazing. It's amazing to see friends, family, people I haven't seen for years. I can't see any of Senator Haradine's offspring in here. That's a good thing. Thank you all for coming and to everyone online. Thank you so much for logging in. I've certainly had quite a few emails from people saying that they'll be watching online and thank you to the National Library and to Rowan and Sharon who have made today possible. So Robbie, Rowan did explain why that you've had a bit to do with the library, but I would have thought, and I think many people in the audience would have thought that we would have done this at a sex shop in Fyshwick. So just explain a little bit more about why we're doing it here.

Well, I think Rowan's probably one of the main reasons actually because she opened the door for us, so thank you again. But yeah, before that, I mean, looking at the book, I don't know whether Roger's here tonight, but 40 years ago, here he is. My good friend, Roger Lilford and I started a magazine called Matilda, which was a political humorous satire magazine, which burned brightly for a year and a half before it went down in a welter of writs. And I think Mark loves here too, our esteemed solicitor at the time.

Who never got paid for it? Never got paid, no. Yeah,

Robbie Swan:

That's right.

Fiona Patten:

We've done on that contract.

Robbie Swan:

But Matilda's DNA is all through this book and I think unashamedly so. When Matilda did fold, we put together all of the cartoons and the photos and the writs and the telexes and all that sort of stuff into a big box and left them at the national gallery here. And it's now part of the collection here, is that what you said? It's a library. Yeah. So we have to refer back to Matilda and thank Matilda for being in existence, but I'd also have to think Philip Adams, who was a big part of this book as well in the sense that he's written a fabulous prologue, which I think is one of the best essays on censorship that you'll ever see. And his creative input at Kookaburra Magazine after Matilda and 2UE, he's in this book quite a bit.

Fiona Patten:

Okay. So the book starts, Robbie, and it says, "All porn is political, all politics is porn." It's a nasty thought really if you think of politicians and porn too closely together. But anyway, what can people expect to read? Because I'm sure every single person here will want to read this book, or maybe, maybe not, after you've heard about it.

Robbie Swan:

Well, I mean, look, this is- It's

Fiona Patten:

The only time I've seen Peter Costello happy with John Howard.

Robbie Swan:

No, some politics is more pornographic than others, but this is a book of short stories, essentially. It's not connected by time or reference or anything. It's just a whole lot of short stories that turned up during our time in the sex industry and working at Eros. And that actually was an old bus ad that we put on the back of Action Buses for three days before it was taken down for my radio show with Mike Jeffries.

Fiona Patten:

Good old action buses.

Robbie Swan:

Yeah.

But on the surface, it's sort of, I suppose Rowan said it's part memoir, part social history, all that kind of stuff. Sure, it's there. But we wrote these stories in a sense like they're like an onion with a rough skin on the outside. And as you peel them back, they're sort of layered with ethical and philosophical and moral and legal issues that run around the sex industry. And so that's how I was hoping people would see these stories, that as they read through them and you get below the essential kind of pithy story that's there, you'll see underneath it a whole lot of other things. And that's the way that I've read it and I hope people would read it that way too.

Fiona Patten:

Oh, good. I mean, now despite the cover, I actually was never a porn star. I did have a porn star T-shirt, but we did meet with a lot of adult performers and porn stars and we brought out a lot to Australia and I must say the press club speech that was given last week reminded me that we brought Owner Z, who was a bondage queen out to Australia and out to meet members of parliament and to talk. And she talked also to a packed press club, but she spoke about workers' rights and she spoke about unionising the sex industry unlike our other friend.

I also worked at a carwash, but we spoke to a lot of adult performers and we brought them in so that they could share their lived experience with members of parliament. And we tell some of those stories in the book. We had a great night at Eros House, which Robbie called the Magical Clittery tour. And these were adult performers who had come out to Australia, some of them met with MPs, but really it was to see the face. And so often when we'd go into parliament, people would go, or politicians, you seem so nice, just really could not understand that not for a minute. I mean, the people that we met, Roxy Giselle, she had a degree in philosophy, Bobby Star, she was in a symphony orchestra. I think she played the bassoon and even people like Richard Neville. Everybody wanted to meet porn stars, I can tell you.

Well, actually not everyone, Robbie.

Robbie Swan:

Not everyone. No. One of the adult stars we brought out in the late '80s, early '90s was a woman actress called Jamie Summers, who was a real valley girl from America. And we'd lined up an appointment with her to see, who was it?

Fiona Patten:

Andrew Peacock? No.

Robbie Swan:

No, no, it was-

Fiona Patten:

Peter Costello.

Robbie Swan:

Peter Costello, that's right, when he was attorney general, before he was treasurer. So I went up there with a photographer from Time Magazine at that stage, Irene Dowdy and we walked through the place and we took her into the parliamentary gym and swimming pool and Irene took some lovely photos there and the next day, of course, somehow they got leaked into the daily 'terrorgraph and the day after that, of course, Andrew Peacock came out on the front page saying how disgusting it was and you know how appalling it was that a porn star would swim in the pool and he had to wash his hands. It was unbelievable, but they carried on like that. Anyway, we were there to see Peter Costello and we'd made an appointment through one of his secretaries and once we got up there to the office, oh no, he's not here.

He had to go to another meeting. He was out the back and so he-

Fiona Patten:

We could hear him.

Robbie Swan:

He clearly had decided he didn't want to meet a porn star in the end and so that was that. But it was interesting how you met with politicians. I mean, mind you, Costello, 20 years on, became very good friends with the porn king, Con Ange. Well, he may not have been good friends, but they became friendly. So he obviously found something that he liked in the industry.

Fiona Patten:

I mean, Con Ange was a great fan of the Cronulla Football Club. Of course, our former Prime Minister Morrison was also a great fan, but I don't know whether he was in the change rooms when Con Ange used to bring in a huge box of dildos

Robbie Swan:

That's right.

Fiona Patten:

For the players for some reason. As you'll read in the book and as the name of the book, we've had a lot of fun and we've always thought that humour was a really powerful way of getting a message across. And I think these days when you think about political messaging, we see so much of it couched in fear, couched in anger, couched in every other negative. So we've always wanted to include humour and we've always wanted to enjoy our work and have fun. And there's a lot of stunt politics and Robbie is the master of stunt politics. And sadly, this stunt happened before the internet and there is absolutely no photographic evidence of it and I have no doubt this would have gone viral. Tell us about this. This is the only way it's going to actually be recorded. Yeah.

Robbie Swan:

At this stage in my career, I think this was about 1991, I was over it with morals campaigners, trying to argue with them was like arguing with Donald Trump. He just didn't get a straight answer on anything and it went off into all sorts of areas. And so when Dennis Stevenson, which many people here will remember started the, what was it? Abolish Self-Government Party and he very quickly forgot about abolishing self-government once he was in there and started to then hammer the right wing Christians and try and get that moral vote. And of course we were in his sights.

Fiona Patten:

He was the abolished porn party actually.

Robbie Swan:

Yeah, that's right. So I'm sick of this. So I thought to myself one day, I thought, oh, I'm just going to have to go at this at a different direction and use satire. So I grabbed a friend of mine, Gavin Evans, who's not in the audience tonight. It might be online, Gavin, if he's there. And we went out to Fyshwick and bought a blow up doll, which was called the Kylie Doll at that stage because Kylie was popular and a couple of bottles of helium that you blow balloons up with and Dennis Stevenson had put on a show at the Albert Hall where he had all the faithful coming in there and he was lecturing to them. And I'll just read you a piece out of the book, which I think describes this probably better than anything. Dennis is in there dressed in sartorial black saying, "Pornography is ripping the soul out of our city.

Depravity is around the corner and the government sits back and allows this filth to proliferate." He was building to his own particular kind of climax, which was our cue to unroll the painted plastic Kylie. Gavin made the valves ready on the gas cylinders and pushed the rubber hose with the plastic nozzle into Kylie's special hole. The one that took the gas, kissed by the helium prince, she slowly popped and crackled into life and awoke from her boxed slumber. The final transformation was complete in about five minutes and when her large O-ringed mouth pushed forward under pressure from the gas and her eyes bulged with slightly expectant look, hard and taut, she was now ready to fulfil her dharma. She was ready to fly. We flipped her over onto her tummy and as Dennis wound the crowd up with the wages of sin, we cupped her late express and pudenda and marched out from behind the conifers towards the open French doors of the Albert Hall and launched her into the room with an almighty shove.

She glided like a stealth bomber for a few metres and then slowly started to rise and that was all we needed to see. And we took off and we ran like crazy down to get the car, which was down at the Chinese gardens and raced away. And there was never anything said about it the next day in the papers. There was nothing-

Fiona Patten:

And sadly, way too late did we think of the idea of doing it again tonight.

So just imagine Kylie floating over you. Robbie is a larrikin as you can hear. He was also a publisher. He did many magazines, Simply Living, Matilda as he's just mentioned, but he also wanted to be a filmmaker. I'm quite pleased he probably never managed to get to reach that point in his career. And I think probably I'm looking at Angie, his daughter thinking she probably agrees with me. But you set up to do a film shoot. Well, you were shooting photographs, weren't you? But it was going to be a story for a book or sorry, for a film, wasn't it? Anyway, tell us about it.

Robbie Swan:

Well, I mean-

Fiona Patten:

I mean, you were actually publishing Raiders with Roger at the

Robbie Swan:

Time. Well, that's right. We were doing the Raiders magazine at that time. And of course, once the Raiders found out that we were involved in the porn industry, they tore the contract up in a very fascible moment out of the Queanbeyan League Club, which Roger can't remember really well, but I do. But it just was interesting that we were doing normal work as well, like publishing work as well as working for the adult industry at that stage. And I think this other stunt, I suppose you'd call it, was one where I had a woman from the Australian Federal Police, Christina, had just finished up there and rang me and she wanted to be a porn star. And so I'd said, "Well, okay, I can help you to it. "

Fiona Patten:

You'd be surprised how many phone calls we would get like that. Mainly from men.

Robbie Swan:

Anyway, so I put her onto a producer and then by the way, did you keep your federal police uniform? And she said, "Oh yeah. Okay, that's great." And I knew another male model who looked like an ASIO agent. So we tried to put this film together of a film amongst the enforcement agencies of Australia with love affairs and stuff like that. So I thought, if we're going to do this properly, we can't just look like we've been to the Sweet Apple Theatrical Shop and bought these costumes. We need to actually go out to these places where they actually are and film them on site. And so the first one was ASIO headquarters up at Russell Hill. So I went up there with the two actors in the car and buzzed the doorbell on the ASIO headquarters and said what I wanted to say into the thing and there was no answer.

He would lead me away into the bowels of ASIO for interrogation and then throw me in their own private slammer. I know it sounds a bit strange, but I didn't want to put in a formal request because I thought it would end up in so much red tape and he just continued to look right through me and then he slightly cocked his head to one side like a budgie does when it wants some perspective on a pile of seed. "Look, if it's too much trouble, I'll just leave you alone and I'll go on my way." Suddenly he spoke through gritted teeth and clenched buttocks. "You've got two minutes, not a second longer, and I don't want anyone else in the frame. Do you understand me? " I was stunned. He'd brought my amateur performance. "Yes, sir, I do understand. Thank you, sir. Don't worry.

We'll be gone in a minute." And with that, I rushed down and gathered the two actors out of there and they came up on the front steps of ASIO and performed a few unspeakable acts. We jumped in the car and raced over to the high court where they lay down in under the bushes and performed probably the first legal act, whatever under there. I think since then, a high court judge has been pinged for something.

Fiona Patten:

I think that's actually a good segue into the room because while we tell this story in the book, this story is also taught in law schools around Australia and the adult industry challenged the ACT Government and took them to the high court and challenged them on a constitutional matter under Section 90 of the Constitution. And this was because in the ACT, Trevor Cain, who was the chief minister, said, "If I can't ban porn, I'm going to tax it out of existence." And we said, "No, you're fucking not. " Well, we didn't say that, but anyway-

Robbie Swan:

Mark

Fiona Patten:

Loved it, who did the audience tonight? But the lawyer said that in as many words, but it went to the high court and it was successful. So the tax was thrown out. We were successful in beating that. What it also put into jeopardy was the petrol excise, the tobacco excise, the liquor excise, all of which were collected by the states. So it created some extraordinary change. And even today when you're looking at constitutional matters or you're getting advice on Section 90, quite often you will see the capital duplicators case quoted in law books, in legal advice on Section 90. So the porn industry has done a lot for this country, though you have to look at what's happening with tobacco right now

Audience member 5:

And

Fiona Patten:

The ridiculous excises. And in my hometown of Melbourne where we have fire bombings every week because of illicit tobacco and the fact that they made vapes illegal. And so you have to wonder whether maybe it wasn't the right thing to send the excise to the federal government. But Robbie, there's quite a few profiles in this book and as you were saying, it unpeels this onion. So do you want to tell us about Jim Hamill, who he says he created the first portable vibrator. It weighed about four kilos. So it wasn't for your carry on, that's for sure.

Robbie Swan:

Yeah. Well, Jim, I mean, this is part of, there are three or four profiles- Yeah,

Fiona Patten:

That is a torch.

Robbie Swan:

There's three or four profiles in this book of people. Sadly, all of them have died since writing this. And Jim Hamill was one. He died last year, but I interviewed him at length on this and everything he said stacked up and he would be the first producer of electric vibrators, portable vibrators in this country and he made them using a mould of his own dick, he said. That was the only part of the story I didn't believe. Bullshit. But that's what he said. And a scale electric slot car motor and an embassy torch. And he worked out how to do that himself. And

Fiona Patten:

A giant battery.

Robbie Swan:

A big battery, yeah. But his story is not just so much in the vibrators, but it's one of the most Dickensian stories I've ever read about someone growing up in Australia in the 1940s. He was sent to a boy's home. We Australian out of his own home at the age of 11. He lived under Sydney Harbour Bridge for a year, scounging food out of bins and stuff like that. And then he came to this and in the end, his profile, he takes on Robert Askin's corrupt vice squad who tried to muscle in on his vibrator business and put a gun to his head. So it's a really extraordinary story to see. The second one in there is our long lost friend, Rebecca Gail, who worked with us at Eros for many years running the love bus for us at some stage. She was running a belly dancing course at the TAFE College for a while.

And at some stage, the new boss at the TAFE College said, "No, this is against our ethics here. You're training people to enter the sex industry," or something like that.

Fiona Patten:

I mean, she did want to do that, but she hate to just do belly dancing.

Robbie Swan:

These are 40 and 50 year old women learning to do belly dancing, hardly. But anyway, Fiona had pushed the ACT Government not long before this to make employment and job and occupation as a reason to be able to win a discrimination case in the courts. And so Rebecca sued them under that thing saying that she was a belly dancing teacher.

Fiona Patten:

Yeah. It was under a human rights charter in the ACT. It is an offence to discriminate against someone on the grounds of their job calling or trade calling or occupation. Yeah. Trade calling occupation. Thanks, Sue. Hi, Sue.

Robbie Swan:

Yes. I mean, Rebecca did that. She picked up, I don't know how much they weren't allowed to say, but she got want some money and she set up Ms. Kitker's school of ...

Fiona Patten:

Burlesque.

Robbie Swan:

Burlesque. And it was a very successful school here. When she died from a brain haemorrhage, the place was packed out. And so it was a wonderful ... She had a lovely life. The other thing that she did, of course, was when she provided the entertainment services for the climate change conference here. And that was extraordinary because as you see, the BBC picked up the story and ran it. It was a storm over climate dancing. The last-

Fiona Patten:

That wasn't because she didn't use recyclable balloons.

Robbie Swan:

No, that's right. It wasn't. No, she had pins that she had gave to the audience so they could pop the balloons one by one. And some of the hard line feminists had really objected to it and walked out. And Anthony Albanese as an environment minister then, or shadow environment minister, came out saying it was appalling and disgusting and he couldn't believe that someone would do that. And anyway, so Rebecca turned people's heads. The last one that we did in there was the nun from Hell who was a 47 year old grandmother from Perth who'd won a Grandmother of the Year competition over there with Channel seven and was a black belt in Karate and then formed a ... She went back to ... She'd been in a nunnery at some stage, I think, and she'd been interested in being a nun in the Catholic church, but then decided, nah, I'm not going to do that.

I'll become the nun from hell. And so she wrote a beautiful book about a transgressive nun named Sister Benedict and what nuns could get up to and called it nunism. Unfortunately, she died as well. And I'm still left with the book and a lot of the artwork and stuff, which is really good. So any publishers in the audience here who might like to have a look at it. And you

Fiona Patten:

Know we know a publisher?

Robbie Swan:

We do.

Fiona Patten:

Yeah. We might do that. Just publish this book.

Robbie Swan:

Yeah.

Fiona Patten:

Watch out. The next book will be the nun from hell. But there was many ways that it was challenging to represent the adult industry and people were very uncomfortable and politicians are really uncomfortable about sex. They don't like to talk about it. They usually get nervous. And I know when I was first elected into the parliament and so every time you're named, it's Fiona Patten from the Australian Sex Party and it did not roll off their tongues I can assure you. They stammered over it. But then as soon as we changed the name to reason, they all said, "Oh, it was much better when it was sex." But we used to give a lot of evidence at parliamentary inquiries and it used to be us against Haradine a lot of the time who had watched more porn. I said he had, he said I had.

He could reel off far more titles than I could ever remember. But in this particular Senate hearing, we were looking at ... There's a call to ban X-rated films. There was always a call to ban X-rated films. These are non-violent erotic films, called to ban X-rated films. And in this case, we turned up to the committee hearing, we swore an oath and promised to tell the truth. And then they said, "Before you go on, we'd just like to tell you that you've been charged with contempt of parliament for a letter that you wrote to us as a cover to the submission that you've put in. Now please, if you'd like to make an opening statement." And we were like, "Shit." Well, what did we say that made us contempt of parliament? And if we say it again, are we going to get even more contempt of parliament?

So we mumbled our way through that inquiry and afterward we were charged with contempt of parliament. You don't get lawyers when you're charged with contempt parliament. You can write a submission to the privileges committee. They consider it and they did. And they found that we probably were guilty of contempt of parliament in that we were threatening senators because we had said, "Listen, if you all vote to ban X-rated films, we will name the ones who have bought X-rated films because we have a list of 1.3 million people and you are on it.

Some of you are on it. " And so that was considered a contempt parliament. In the end, they said, "Yeah, we think you are, but we're not going to find you guilty of it, but if you dare do it again, you will be in the slammer in the parliament house for the ... " So I think it's to the pleasure of the president. No, he's majesty now.

Robbie Swan:

Yes, yes.

Fiona Patten:

But there were many ways that they tried to exclude us.

Robbie Swan:

I mean, one of the ways we found her was, of course, apart from Irene Dowdy, the Time photographer losing her press pass over those photos, I lost my press pass as well at some stage for them saying that I was a lobbyist for the porn industry rather than a journalist. I disputed that because the porn industry or the sex industry in general had nearly two million people that subscribed to magazines like People, Picture, Penthouse, Playboy, the X-rated catalogues and all of them had political information in them about what was going on with censorship. So I thought I was a journalist because I was writing stories for these people to publish onto their lists. But no, I lost it. And it just reminded me this week of Greg Jericho sacking from the press gallery because he called journalists to attention over the fact that they weren't hammering Pauline Hanson enough, asking her the tough questions.

I mean, there's a bit of difference between me losing my pass and him, I guess, but I would've thought he was a journalist as well. I wonder where we're headed these days in that regard.

Fiona Patten:

I mean, this is Gary Humphries and Kerr's Kerr. We weren't lobbying him. We were lobbying Gary to be fair, to be fair. We were at Parliament lobbying him. Yeah, that's right. We were under your press pass. The one person that a dear friend that we met and David Barnett, he died about four years ago. He was an extraordinary journalist and a very conservative man. I don't know whether Pru ... Oh, Pru's here. Pru Goward, his wife is joining us today. But David was a remarkable person. He was a conservative old fart and some things that he used to say, "I used to just want to scream at." But he was a very good friend and he believed in free speech. He believed fundamentally in free speech and yet he and Pru wrote the biography for John Howard and he was a really wonderful man, but John Howard wanted to ban X-rated films.

We were speaking to David about this and we made mention of the 1.3 million people that we had on mailing lists and he said, "You've got what? " And this was in 1996, 1.3 million, you could change an election with that. And we were like, "Yeah, we're thinking about doing that. We're thinking about writing to every single one of them saying, if you vote liberals, they're going to take away your right to buy or watch an X-rated film, because if they had banned X-rated films, they would have been illegal to import and illegal to possess. So you could have sex. And in fact, in the ACT, you could have sex for money legally, but you couldn't film it. But anyway, so David came up with this strategy and he said, You know what? I want you to go away, get those 1.3 million people, break them down into postcodes and break them down into electorates and tell me what percentage of each electorate you can write to.

In sum, we had 10% of the electorate on the mailing list. That was Brisbane. Canberra very low, very low. Apparently we all drove to Fyshwick or Mitchell. Yeah, that's right. So David then wrote this amazing story in The Good Weekend and it changed everything. Everything. Well, he then continued to help us and set up a meeting with Andrew

Robbie Swan:

Robb. Yeah. Andrew Robb who was a federal director of the Liberal Party at that stage, David had talked to him and said, look, this is a nonsense. We could lose this election over something as silly as porn. And so they got together and talked to Darrell Williams, the future attorney general and just very pragmatically said, okay, let's do it. Unfortunately, Andrew Robb said, look, we can't talk about this in the media beforehand so you're going to have to trust us. Which was, we thought, I don't know. But in the end we did and they were true to their word all three of them and it was just fabulous. And at that point it was almost impossible to rid X-rated films from Australia that was never going to happen after that point. There was a few other things that did happen in between there that made it a bit dicky from time to time, but that decision saved it.

Fiona Patten:

So we didn't mail it to everyone to tell them not to vote for the Liberal Party and John Howard did get elected and he maintained a ban on X, but he said, "But we're going to introduce a new classification called nonviolent erotica, which was what we wanted all along. And it's what we'd been fighting for for years to get. " And Darrell Williams introduced it into parliament and then Senator Harradine hit again entirely breaking the law. He gave a whole bunch of films from his collection, illegal films. They were not X-rated films. They would have been refused classification films. Black

Robbie Swan:

Transsexual films, which

Fiona Patten:

Of course- Yeah, he seemed to have quite a lot of those,

But very overrepresented. I mean, the same way as trans issues are overrepresented in some of the debates that we're having at the moment, but Deanne Kelly got hold of them. He gave them to her and she showed them in a party room at Parliament, which is completely illegal to show particularly a film that was unclassified. Anyway, she showed these and said, "This is what nonviolent erotica is, which it wasn't." But unfortunately, watching porn with Deanne Kelly put a lot of people off and NVE was scrapped, but X never was. So David Barnett was David really did in all honesty save the industry at that stage, which is a highly unlikely thing to say about John Howard's biographer and Malcolm Fraser's press secretary. And I think he would have been an unofficial advisor to ... He was a friend of John's with Pru. So

We miss him dearly, but we did set up the party as you know. It was Robbie's idea. They even did a cutout cardboard character of this, but we did get elected and as Rowan said at the beginning, we were able to pass some fairly significant legislation and I think much to everyone's surprise the Australian Sex Party where you come first was able to introduce ... We were able to shepherd and introduce voluntary assisted dying in Victoria, which as you all know, has now been rolled out across the country. We introduced safe access zones around abortion clinics, which again has been rolled out not only across the country, but also in Scotland and the UK. We were able to decriminalise sex work, and I can see Sue Metzenrath in the audience. She was one of the pioneers of sex work law reform here in the ACT.

We did some drug law reform and we had fun doing it. But Robbie, explain this.

Robbie Swan:

Rasputin's penis. Look, there are another half a dozen stories in the more, which we're not going to be able to talk about, but one of them was we tried to bring this object, it's like Pharlap's heart. We tried to bring it out to Australia, it's for sexpo, but the guy who owns it,

Fiona Patten:

Which is- I went to Russia to see it.

Robbie Swan:

Yeah. But

Fiona Patten:

The museum was closed. It's

Robbie Swan:

Supposedly real. It's Rasputin, the mad monk's penis and it's-

Fiona Patten:

Or a sea slug.

Robbie Swan:

Anyway, that's an interesting story. This was one of the down under series films that was made around the Cotter Dam. I think John Lark bribed the Parks Rangers there to let them go in there and all this white water flowing everywhere and those big turnbuckles and having sex amongst them. It was a fabulous couple of films that were made out there. They were really ... And then of course, John Lark, who is now living in quiet retirement up on the Gold Coast. And I think we all have John to thank for a lot of the reforms that happened around X-rated films as well. I think there's also a story in there on Mal Colston, Senator Mal Colston and how he offered to ... He asked us to offer him a bribe of $30,000 to vote for an amendment to the Telecommunications Act to a-

Fiona Patten:

He's dead now.

Robbie Swan:

Yeah. That was quite an amazing story, which never, ever came out. Of course, we didn't go near that because we just thought that was like going down so many rabbit holes where there were ferrets at the end of it that we thought that's not a good idea. So we didn't offer him the bribe, but he asked us to.

Fiona Patten:

Yeah. I mean, I remember that story slightly differently.

Robbie Swan:

Read the book. And of course, we're probably finished now and saying that of course this was an old Matilda cartoon and I have to say that cartooning's just always been one of my loves. And alongside the old Matildas in here tonight, I can see Geoff Pryor as well, who was probably the mainstay cartoonist of Matilda as well.

Fiona Patten:

His series on brothels was something to behold.

Robbie Swan:

Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yes. But this was a Bill Lee cartoon. Of course, Bill, like half the Matilda contributors is now dead and this was a cartoon that we used to publish in brochures and we'd send it to people and everything whenever we tried to see, to characterise the main opponents of our arguments in parliament. And I think we'll just let you guess who they are. They're probably a composite, but that was how we saw our adversaries.

Fiona Patten:

Well, some of them like Keith Wright, who was the federal Queensland politician, he said, "Protect the children, ban pornography." And that was his catch cry. He wanted porn-free zones around the country. Anyway, he spent eight years in jail for abusing a child on the desk of his electorate office or his church office. No his electorate office. Anyway, thank you, Robbie, for taking us on a quick trip on the way to the sex party. Good. We'd love to open it up to questions if people wanted to ask us any, and we will name names. It's fine. Oh, now I can see you all.

Robbie Swan:

Yeah. We have a microphone. Oh, good. I think this is being recorded, isn't it, Rowan? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Audience member 1:

Robin, Fiona, thank you for ... That's very, very funny and very informative, but I think the question that probably all any politicians here would like answered and any politicians perhaps watching online is the question they always ask would book about politics. Is there an index?

Fiona Patten:

No, we on purpose didn't put an index in and we said, "You'll have to read it to see if you're in it. " But thank you for that.

Robbie Swan:

Any more? No.

Fiona Patten:

Okay.

Audience member 2:

I've got a question. I'm going to steal the spotlights since I'm holding the mic. What do you think of the sex industry today and the way the internet's changed it and people's perceptions of it and just how widely accessible it is and the types of content that are being created?

Fiona Patten:

Yeah. I mean, it's fundamentally changing and now with AI, it will exponentially change, but it has its pluses and obviously some sides, some negatives. But for sex workers, it's providing different ways to work. It's providing safer ways to work. It's providing really interesting ways to explore. For people exploring themselves, they can find their tribes, they can really feel less alone around their sexuality, but also it has gone to new depths. We are seeing more and more misogynistic material. We are seeing more and more really unapologetically revolting material, but I don't think that's just in the adult industry. We've got the Andrew Tates of the world. We've got the Alexantics of the world. We've got the Senator Babbitt. We've got Ralph Babbitt of the world. Our politics is reaching new depths as well, but I think certainly some of the material that is now available and you worry about how AI is also going to impact that.

But I think on the plus side, it has also allowed us to express ourselves and it has allowed us to experience sex and sexuality and explore it in a whole lot of new ways.

Robbie Swan:

And I think too, that the period that this book has set in the early 90s and late 80s and even up to the 2000s, I mean, when you looked at Fyshwick at that stage out there, the material that was being produced there was pretty harmless. It wasn't violent at all. The X-ray-

Fiona Patten:

It was nonviolent erotica.

Robbie Swan:

Yeah. The X rating meant you couldn't have any, you couldn't even say, you could say- You could

Fiona Patten:

Say fuck me, but you couldn't say fuck you.

Robbie Swan:

Yeah, because it would be bad. It's true. It's true. That's how it was. And that was great. We liked it. But you've also got to remember too that in the 90s out in Fyshwick, probably a few people remember the Molongo Mall out there. I mean, I called it the fortress of fuck because it was sort of half the buildings out there were devoted to the porn industry or to the sex industry and even the ones that weren't were sort of accountants and people like that who were involved. And it was a classic situation. I mean, someone should make a film about it at some stage because it's something we'll never see again. But all of the films that were made then were out in that area were really quite harmless sex films, but that has changed now. And the

Fiona Patten:

Most popular films used to be the amateur porn.That was the most popular genre of films because people liked to see themselves or they didn't necessarily want to see the pneumatic breasts and the pneumatic lips and everything. They actually wanted to see something that more closely resembled themselves and more closely resembled what they saw in the mirror. And when you could film yourselves as well, there was ... Yeah. The Naughty Housewife Series. The Naughty Housewife Series. Very popular. That's right. Very popular. Exactly. But yeah, it was-

Robbie Swan:

I have heard too that lately, like with music now, newly pressed plastic LPs, vinyl LPs really de rigeur these days that people are going back to DVDs now.

Fiona Patten:

Well, that is actually because of the- Age restrictions. Age restrictions that the government has introduced and not enough people have got VPNs. So they sold 20,000 DVDs and videos last week in Melbourne, 20,000. So apparently people did not get rid of their VCRs, which is remarkable and people are flocking back to it while they figure out how to get a VPN and get around the age restrictions. So Pornhub, they can get porn hub back. Andrew.

Audience member 3:

A Labour staffer friend of mine who shall remain unnamed once said to me that you made the Dan Andrews government much less draconian and much more progressive. I'm just wondering how you see your legacy from that time.

Fiona Patten:

Oh, gee, I didn't even ask you to ask that. Yeah, look, I was in a very lucky position that I held balance of power for eight years and so I was able to nudge the government towards things. And certainly if you looked at something like assisted dying, there was many in the Labour Party and in the Labour Caucus who would've loved to have seen assisted dying, including the health minister, Jill Hennessy, who had just experienced her mother dying really in a really awful drawn out way. But yeah, Dan Andrews was completely against assisted dying. And when I was first, because everyone was a bit shocked that I got elected and I said, "The first thing I'm going to do is move a motion to inquire into voluntary assisted dying," which I think at the press pack at the time was a little bit disappointed in.

They were hoping I was going to say something a lot more fun. I said, "Make nudity compulsory." As one family first guy said, "If you make sex compulsory, I'll vote for you. " Yeah, but I lose your wife.

Robbie Swan:

Well, it's interesting too, because I believe in karma and it was quite interesting that Brian Harradine held balance of power in the Senate for so many years and stuffed us so many times that when Fiona ended up holding balance of power in the Victorian Parliament that she was able to nudge all these progressive reforms through. So it was karma.

Fiona Patten:

Yeah. Only

Robbie Swan:

Pity that you didn't leave long enough to

Fiona Patten:

See it. It wasn't so much horse trading, but it was the ability to be able to nudge them in what I saw as the right direction and they very often needed my vote. It wasn't horse trading, but I did have ... They wanted to keep me on site and it wasn't things that they didn't want to do. It was just things that they wouldn't do and so I was able to move them in that way. I introduced 21 private members' bills, none of them passed, but about half of them became law and they were government laws.

Audience member 4:

Is this one? Yeah. Sorry. First of all, I want to just remark that the newest version of the Firefox browser has a free VPN and it works.

Fiona Patten:

Oh, great.

Audience member 4:

So I just got back to it-

Fiona Patten:

I don't think the adult industry wants to know that.

Audience member 4:

That kind of leads to my next point. You've done a really interesting and illuminating job of connecting the ethos of Australian society and free speech in our country and including some of the state variations and connecting it to this particular area of discussion. I've just come back a couple of weeks ago from 30 years mostly living in the US, South Korea and Japan and it's fascinating how much variety there is in the discourse around this. But halfway through those 30 years, media became globalised and the interflow across all national boundaries almost evaporated. Like every 14 year old that I've dealt with as a teacher in all of those countries as in Australia would be able to tell you how. I'm really curious, given the particular Australian approach that you have been going through for us, what's been the impact then in the last 15 years of this globalisation of media and then that opens all the doors for the laws and the culture and so forth of different countries to flow in and out of each other.

How has that impacted what you've experienced in Australia?

Fiona Patten:

I mean, it's a really interesting question. I think it's made it very difficult for a homegrown industry, though on the flip side of that, the expansion of the internet and the expansion of online has made it easier for people to get their messaging out there. I mean, Australia always suffered from the overwhelming amount of American material that we watched on television. It was hard for the Australian industry. In fact, I mean, there's a bit in the book about the porn industry actually getting a trade export grant to export adult material to the States. It's interesting, we see the sort of censorship. We saw the Senator Alston wanted to put in Internet filter on Australia.

They seem like quaint ideas today and I think the ubiquity of online and the fact that there are no boundaries, it's now changing the way a classification system that distinguishes between R rated and X rated is now archaic. So the way that we classify material, the way that we view material is changing enormously and it's having its side effects. We know young people are finding they found the VPN long before you gave me that helpful tip. But we've got to look at things like sex education and we need to be doing a lot more of that a lot earlier.

Rowan Henderson:

Okay. Last question.

Audience member 5:

Okay. Your answer. Robbie and Fiona, great to hear your achievements, the things you've done to improve the society, free speech and so on. Is there any regrets in either of you along the way or is there anything left undone that you would like to achieve?

Fiona Patten:

I have one. I'll speak mine and then you can think of one. He lives with no regrets. So he's going to have to think of one. The sale of X-rated films is still illegal in every state in Australia. It is insane. We have decriminalised or legalised ... Sex work is pretty much decriminalised around the country with the exceptions of South Australia and Tasmania, but the sale of an X-rated film from an adult store to an adult is a crime with up to two years imprisonment in New South Wales. So I regret that we didn't get them legalised before they became obsolete. Although they're not obsolete now.

Robbie Swan:

Look, I regret dressing as a woman in the early 90s.

Fiona Patten:

Do you really though? Yes. Oh, that's right. He was wearing ...

Robbie Swan:

Yeah, that was your clothes.

Fiona Patten:

Yeah. And the scarf you got from body politics.

Robbie Swan:

No, I don't regret that, but I regret the fact that my two daughters, one of whom is in the front row, saw me sacked from the school board at the Yarralumla Primary School as a result of that. And they just didn't understand, did they?

Fiona Patten:

Well, I mean, Caroline Sweetly did have a very strong accent.

Robbie Swan:

She did.

Fiona Patten:

She had a very strong, I don't know what accent, but it was a very strong accent. But

Robbie Swan:

No, I don't think I actually have any regrets from those days. I mean, it was pretty tough some of the things you went through. And of course there was the probium that attached to working for the sex industry, which was tough on the kids. They, I think, had to endure that. Although once they got to an age of 19 or even 17 or 18, it was a bit cool for their friends.

Fiona Patten:

You like to think that, darling.

Robbie Swan:

Yeah.

Fiona Patten:

We were never cool.

Robbie Swan:

Yeah. But no, I think once you got over that though and having to work in a tough industry like that, it wasn't bad. I mean, it could have been worse. It could have been working for the National Party. But no, I don't think we have any regrets, do you? Not really. Well,

Fiona Patten:

I had one. I said it.

Robbie Swan:

Oh yeah, that one. Yeah, that one. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough.

Rowan Henderson:

Okay. And on that note, thank you, Robbie and Fiona. That was a really fascinating discussion and a really great insight into the content of the book and thank you to the audience for all of your questions as well. So if you're keen to know more, you can purchase a copy of the book at the bookshop upstairs. They've stocked up, especially for tonight and Robbie and Fiona will be available in the foyer for signing and any more questions that you didn't want to ask in front of everyone else.

Fiona Patten:

And we're also going for a drink at the Realm Hotel, please come and join us.

Audience member 1:

Yeah.

Rowan Henderson:

So excellent. Thank you, Robbie and Fiona again and thank you everyone for coming along tonight and we look forward to seeing you at future library events.

Audience member 4:

Thank you.