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| Australian Immigration - open-bordello policy | |
Politics makes for
strange bedfellows, and there's nothing like sexual scandal to create the
mood. The sex slave issue has been portrayed as a mounting problem the media again, as a seemingly
endless stream of visa-less women in Australia claim to have been
taken from their happy families in impoverished countries, and
forced into sex slavery in Australian brothels. Its one of those mutually agreeable issues that seems to satisfy all parties.
- The reactionary right can be up in arms about the lack of morality of sex smugglers and
sex-worker clients alike, while screaming for greater powers to 'guide' the
morality of those around them.
- The feminists can
shriek about the debasement of women in society, and add it to the
justifications for greater affirmative action
in the work place, and greater preferential treatment in the general community.
- Open border proponents can use it to create little trickles in the
dyke by insisting that they are refugees.
- And many Australian yobbos can go out to the local bordello and get a
taste of multicultural Bangkok
action without without risking a cavity search by some drug-obsessed customs officer at
Sydney airport.
The only victim, it
seems, is common sense. People generally accept that Australia is an attractive immigration
destination. Getting more money on the dole in Australia than the median wage
in your own country is a pretty powerful incentive, even before the personal freedom and safety issues are
considered. Then there's even the opportunity to go out and get a job. For some reason though, the possibility that Australia might also be an
attractive destination for sex workers (we don't
call them whores anymore), is unthinkable. Unfortunately for the victim lobby groups, whenever they try to hold up a
particular sex-worker as a showcase, the cracks appear in the story. Pictures
of skiing holidays and expensive looking harbor cruises don't do much for the
claims of imprisonment. Nor do the investigations revealing that the women were
prostitutes before they ever came to Australia. So the lobby groups have
changed tack. Visaless sex workers are now encouraged to claim that, while they were told
that they would be plying their oldest trade in Australia, they were also told
that sex-work in Australia is like the movie 'Pretty Woman' in which a
common street-walker (Julia Roberts) meets a caring, handsome and loving single
billionaire (Richard Gere) who falls in love with her. In reality, doing a dozen tricks a night must be pretty much the same in
Sydney as it is in Bangkok, and the cost of living is higher. And the billionaires? Well if they want to experience Bangkok, they
probably fly their Lear jets there for the real thing.
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