Fiona Patten - Sex, Drugs and the Electoral Roll: My Amazing Journey From Sex Worker to Member of Parliament

Each time someone buys a copy of this book, Fred Nile has a cry wank.

Catherine Deveny, writer and comedian

I first met Fiona when I was leader of the Opposition in the ACT Legislative Assembly and later as chief minister. It was her fault that as a Liberal leader, my photo was on the front page of the Canberra Times opening a brothel on World AIDS Day! Over the years Fiona has become a trusted friend. Her advocacy was fundamental to the ACT legalising X-rated videos and legalising brothels, as well as ensuring that sex workers operated in a safe and regulated environment. This book is a great read and unlike any other political memoir.

Kate Carnell, Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman

Fiona Patten is not your usual calculating, synthetic politician. Her racy book about how she got to the top recounts many intriguing stories along the way. Against the odds shes achieved real and meaningful changes to Australian drug policy. I think shes a brave person to have written this.

Alex Wodak AM, President, Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation

Fiona Patten is a true original. She saw a need and filled it: to create space, and a political party, that honours Eros as a fundamental human right and need.

Nina Hartley (TM), RN, US porn star and author of Nina Hartleys Guide to Total Sex

First published in 2018

Copyright Fiona Patten 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

Email:

Web: www.allenandunwin.com

ISBN 978 1 92557 513 2

eBook ISBN 978 1 76063 717 0

Cover design: Deborah Parry Graphics

Cover photographs: Chris Middleton Photography

To Mum and Dad. Not sure what they

would have thought of this, but they would

have had something nice to say I know.

And to Robbie, my soul.

CONTENTS

Winning a seat in the Victorian parliament at the 2014 state election made me the first former sex worker to be elected to a parliament anywhere in Australia. But what is most important here is not me as a politician or me as a former sex worker; its the journey from sex worker to politician that counts as something different. Some might see this as just another form of Pygmalion politics because there have been quite a few Eliza Doolittles elected to Australian parliaments in recent times. No need for a please explain here. No Australian members of parliament, however, have ever come from our commercial sex industry, which for many people has been about as low on the political pecking order as you can get. Its just another sign that politics, like the rest of society, is experiencing what the US futurist Terry Patten calls the acceleration of crazy. Its not actual mad politics but a long overdue shake-out of the various paths to political life where were increasingly seeing real people who represent sections of the community who would never normally get a go in the major parties.

And heres another first. I am the only woman in Australia to have started her own political party and then been elected. I started the Sex Party because I was pissed off with what was on offer from the three major parties. It wasnt just their policies eitherit was the way they did politics. Over the years, they have become like corporations. Places where only the machinists and the technical workers rise up through the ranks into managerial and then executive positions. Nothing wrong with that, as long as they keep up with the rapidly changing world around them. But they havent. Instead theyve became inbred and the lack of new DNA in their ranks is obvious. Occasionally they see the need to introduce new blood into their body politic, but they generally try to achieve this by roping in a celebrity stallion or broodmare rather than trying to change the culture from within.

Labors failed attempt to bring disaffected baby boomers back to the fold by offering Oiler Peter Garrett a prize spot in the ministry did nothing to stop disenchantment within the partythey gave him the environment portfolio and then asked him to praise nuclear energy. The Liberals approached the former Human Rights Commissioner, Tim Wilson, to run for the Victorian seat of Goldstein in the hope that it would stop the drift of small-l Liberals away from the party. They would have been far better off addressing the wholesale takeover of some Victorian branches and executive positions by radical Christian groups and the remnants of Family First.

The proof is blindingly obvious. Marriage equality took two decades of lobbying to get over the line, even though it was clear that there was majority support for it in the community. Voluntary assisted dying (VAD), drug law reform, censorship reform, abortion law reform, stem cell research and other major progressive social issues have all had majority public support in opinion polls for a decade. And where are we up to with all of that?

Voluntary assisted dying failed to get up in the New South Wales parliament in late 2017 because the leaders of both major parties voted against it, yet all the polling showed majority support for it in the community. In Victoria, we finally got it through the upper house by two votes with social conservatives fighting it all the way. Like NSW, polling showed majority support in the community. Medical cannabis has been legislated in a number of state parliaments, but in Victoria, which is generally more progressive than other jurisdictions, locally grown product is still not available and only a handful of patients have successfully used the scheme to access imported products. Its over two years since the legislation was passed and is clear evidence that the major parties are so locked into machine politics that they just cant come at paradigm shifts anymore. In fact, marriage equality is the only progressive issue that has been legislated federally and look how long that took. The $120 million plebiscite that was forced on to everyone was the product of half-a-dozen religious extremists in the Coalition threatening to crack the shits with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. In fact, the failure of government to deal with this issue has been due to these same Coalition MPs, along with a little help from the conservative Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA) on Labors side. Its not a matter of progressive versus conservative forces anymore. Its a systemic failure of the major parties to understand the progressive trends in the electorate because of their moribund core values and long-term relationships with ultra conservative institutions.

How many young Liberals these days are taught the legacy of former party reformers like Don Chipp and John Gorton? None. Theyre saddled with role models like former policeman, Peter Dutton, the former actress, Bronwyn Bishop and the former boxer and trainee Jesuit priest, Tony Abbottall caricatures of politicians from the turn of the last century. Even former Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, the man who brought down the Whitlam Labor government in 1975, had to flee his own party before he died because he couldnt take the stultifying social conservatism anymore.