On the game in Queensland

This latest Brisbane Women’s slogan concerns the Queensland Labor Government’s refusal to enact its own party policy and repeal the Criminal Code on abortion, a policy supported by a majority of Queenslanders and reaffirmed by the State Labor Women’s Conference as recently as May 1991. While my focus here is on the prostitution laws which took effect on 1 February, the slogan indicates the government’s ideological tendency on matters relating to the rights of individuals over their own bodies, particularly women’s rights – as usual. The Government, imagining itself a guardian angel, but acting like a moral guardian, has extended the Nationals’ restrictive laws on pornography. Further, while the 1990 Criminal Code amendments which decriminalize male homosexuality are in many ways preferable to similar legislation in other states, they also set the age of consent for sodomy at eighteen, rather than the usual sixteen years of age, to satisfy the fundamentalists. Craig Patterson notes in the Gay and Lesbian Law Journal that the Queensland Government has produced legislation which serves not just a social justice purpose but also, and rather primarily, a political purpose’. Of saving its own neck perhaps, but if this is the intention, Goss is underestimating, even ignoring, his electorate.