I can only imagine the collective eye-roll of Australian sex industry workers on Tuesday morning as we woke to the coverage of Steve Dickson's "strip club scandal".

We're accustomed to this level of spectacle being made of our work, particularly when the political chess game is heating up. You can almost set your watch by it.

For many Australians, Mr Dickson's entry to an American strip club late last year doesn't feel terribly consequential, with little to no bearing on his moral character or ability to hold public office.

If the roaring trade sex workers do during Parliament's sitting weeks in Canberra is any evidence, the political world's contact with the sex industry is nothing to write home about.

Yet here we are — glued to the feed on Mr Dickson's actions, which had already been called into question via his alleged fundraising efforts with the NRA. And while the coverage is sometimes telling me otherwise, I'd like to think that's because Dickson's behaviour towards the women in that club was deeply unacceptable.

Sex workers are accustomed to a spectacle being made of their work — particularly when an election is heating up. ( ABC News )

Harassment not part of the job

Strip clubs are workplaces. The workers in strip clubs — whether they identify as entertainers, dancers, or sex workers — have rights to safety and fair treatment at work, including in their one-to-one interactions with customers.

Mr Dickson's words and actions reveal how little regard he has for those rights, or the people who hold them.

In Australia, those rights are upheld by federal and jurisdictional law and workplace health and safety guidelines. Strip clubs are legitimate businesses and workers in those clubs can be employees of the business or freelance as sole traders. They are classified as live performers and can access labour rights mechanisms via the Fair Work Commission.

The Fair Work Act protects workers from harassment and bullying at work. The act provides a safety net of minimum entitlements, enables flexible working arrangements and fairness at work, prevents discrimination against employees and creates rights and obligations for employers. There is also state legislation.

A strip club worker's ability to access these mechanisms, however, can be limited by stigma and discrimination in practice. Even when the law theoretically provides us with these protections, we may put other aspects of our lives at risk by "outing" ourselves as sex industry workers.

This is why sex worker organisations advocate for anti-discrimination protections for sex workers, so that we can safely access the protections to which we are entitled. It's also why state-based peer organisations provide support to sex workers seeking labour or human rights redresses.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Watch Duration: 1 minute 30 seconds 1 m 30 s "The footage I saw cannot be ignored": Pauline Hanson on ACA revelations

If we accept that sex work is work, as even Pauline Hanson has been forced to do, we also accept that there are standards of treatment that workers can and should expect from clientele, management, and co-workers, whether or not these are formalised in policy.

As entertainers, strip club workers are providing a form of leisure that creates an atmosphere of playfulness, disinhibition and eroticism. None of those are words I'd use to describe the tone of Mr Dickson's comments in the released footage.

While the codes of conduct in sex work businesses are different to those in more formal professional spaces, they don't mean that displays of racism or misogyny are acceptable, or that dancers and sex workers are, by virtue of their profession, available for verbal or physical intimidation.

Dickson's behaviour is not uncommon

While I don't personally have experience working in strip clubs, the dialogue in the sex worker peer spaces I occupy suggests that Mr Dickson's words and actions aren't particularly uncommon.

Dancers deal with this sort of behaviour enough to do it skilfully — policing the limits of the interaction while maintaining rapport with the client, savvily dodging inappropriate advances without losing the job.

Crowd control and boundary assertion are some of the core skills built in sex-work spaces, which often remain unacknowledged in the misconception that sex work is unskilled labour or "not real work".

These skills aren't ones we should have to sharpen so intensely. We have a right to feel safe at work. We have a right not to be harassed. We have a right to say "no" and for that to be respected.

Crowd control and boundary assertion are some of the core skills built into sex work spaces. ( ABC News: Malcolm Sutton )

Al Jazeera filmed women without consent

We can't speak about codes of conduct in adult industry businesses without acknowledging that Al Jazeera also has something to answer for here.

There's certainly an argument to be made that this footage shouldn't have been taken in the first place. I'm less inclined to adopt One Nation supporters' cries of entrapment than I am to refer to most states' laws prohibiting the visual recording of a person without their consent in a private act or state of undress.

Filming a sex worker at work without their consent is a violation of their right to privacy and reinforcement of the idea that sex work's stigmatising "mystique" and "underground" status makes it something the public should feel entitled to gaze upon.

We should, however, feel entitled to information about a politician who displays such rabid racism and misogyny toward sex workers. In any context — strip club, board room, paddock or press room — Mr Dickson's words display a level of sexism and xenophobia that we should not tolerate from any public servant.

Gala Vanting is the president of the Scarlet Alliance, the Australian sex workers association.