The Business of Sex: Australian Government and the Sex Industry

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Abstract
The expansion of the sex industry over the last three decades has been met by a range of political strategies and responses. This paper examines some of the concerns that have been taken up by Aus tralian parliaments in relation to the trade in both pornography and prostitution. It identifies several important discursive shifts in the postwar period around the figure of the prostitute, the client of prostitution services and the consumer of pornography. While the consumption of pornography has increasingly been regarded by Australian parliaments as a private and legitimate activity for adults, the prostitution industry has become the object of a new patholog ising discourse. For the first time in Australian culture, both pros titutes and their clients have been located as sexually problematic. Since the early 1960s, therefore, the prostitution trade, unlike the pornography trade, has become subject to increasing legal surveil lance and criminalisation. Some of the implications and conse quences of these trends are examined within the broad context of sexual politics in Australian society and government.