A worker in a private room at Auckland's Pelican Club, one of New Zealand's legalised brothels.

"Oh honey, I've got some gorgeous ones tonight: sexy young Bella, raunchy Phoenix, teeny-tiny Abby, Meadow – brunette, slim, long hair, absolute sex appeal, one of our newer ladies, Pippa – Pippa? Out to you hon? You're looking at up to $315 for the hour."

Kaye is delivering her mumsy sales pitch down the phone to a potential client at the Pelican Club - the central Auckland brothel she manages. She's sitting behind a barred window in an office about the size of a cupboard. Dozens of post-it notes are stuck to the walls. Some concern safety – 'watch out for that Arab customer with a strangling fetish', call police if a notorious gang member tries to enter. Others concern cash - "Mark owes $100 to Sabrina".



Tonight is Pippa's first escort. She's wearing dark clothes, her spiky hair straight out of an anime book. The owner of Pelican Club, Lyn King, has given her a test tube of lipstick. "It's her first time wearing make-up," she explains. "She's just a baby".



The client she's going to see is a regular who calls up when his parents leave town. He has an intellectual disability and wants Pippa to dress as a nurse (this doesn't count as a "fantasy"; these cost an extra $60). Last time he paid with a jar of coins.

Pippa spends about 30 minutes debating whether or not to do the job. She isn't sure she can handle a disabled client just yet ("I'm a bit immature") but there's $120 to be made (they charge $110 for the club fee, $120 for the "lady's tip" and $25 for a driver for call-outs).

There are about seven other women in the lounge with her, biding their time until they are summoned for house calls or in-house work in the club's 13 Egyptian-themed rooms. They chat on bar stools, wine in hand, adjusting lingerie and reapplying make up. The music is that of a standard RnB club: T-Pain, Akon, Chris Brown – with the odd classic rock staple (think David Bowie) thrown in.

New Zealand is touted as having the ideal legal model for sex work. In 2003 we became one of the few countries to legalise the industry. Despite that, sex workers still regularly felt the whip of moral panic, with every media furore – more recently claims of underage sex workers in South Auckland – reigniting calls to tear up the groundbreaking legislation. In an area that was already grey to start with, have things gotten better?

WATERCOOLER CHATS

Each 12-hour shift at the Pelican Club kicks off with a meeting where the manager goes over, of all things, the most interesting news items of the day. It's a watercooler prompt of sorts, except clients are paying $230 for sex alongside that glass of water - $120 to the girls, $110 to the house.

What was creating a buzz this Monday? On the weekend a man got drunk and stuck a cone on top of a Nelson cathedral and a cat stole a policeman's badge.

"If I was 18-years-old and trying to talk to a 60-year-old man I didn't have anything in common with, I wouldn't know what to say," says the owner, King, who is overseeing Kaye's pep talk while a journalist is in the room.

"Anyone can give them a bit of bish, bash, bosh but to have some rapport with someone as old as their grandfather is difficult. We give them topics of interest instead of just saying 'hi, how was your day?' and things coming to a grinding halt."

The meeting takes place in one of the sex rooms, where about ten girls cram onto a bed or sprawl across the massage couch to face the manageress who is sitting on a table.

King: "What about sport? The Warriors won. With a minute-and-a-half to go some guy scored the last try."

The girls are reminded of the importance of a clean room. Some had been forgetting to wipe down the showers.

"It's no different to going into a motel room and finding a pubic hair sitting on the pillow," says King.

"You want it to be absolutely immaculate and these men are thinking the same thing. Look for anything left on the floor. The end of a condom packet looks tacky."

THE TEASE AND THE PLEASE

The White House, with its mighty pillars and graffitied Uncle Sam "we want you" ad, is a kind of institution on Queen Street. It offers mince pies, strippers and downstairs, at Monica's, sex.

In the main building, women strip to three songs of their choice – one does Shaggy's Boombastic – and earn their money from tips alone (one White House dollar translates to a normal NZ dollar).

"This means, on a quiet night, they can go home with nearly nothing," says a bartender.

"Upstairs is all about the tease," says co-owner Faye. We're in a room with two red-faced suited men trying to win a game of pool against three naked women. Ultimately, they're distracted by their competition.

"Downstairs is the please. It's like dessert," Faye says.

Monica's is quiet. Three sex workers smoke outside. A Frenchman walks downstairs but is only looking for cigarette boxes to recycle.

"I'll come back next time and get your leftovers," he says.

"Well this is a place to come, " says Renee: a middle-aged woman with kind eyes, a wicked sense of humour and the wisdom of Harry Potter's Professor McGonnagal.

Before her 11 years as a sex worker, Renee was a chef, catering for more than 40 people at a time. Then she became pregnant and things took a turn for the worse. She was diagnosed with post-natal depression and ran into financial trouble.

Aged 34, she saw an ad in the paper for brothel work and showed her partner.

"He wasn't working and was in court – his past had caught up with him. I was so hoping he would say 'no, I love you too much'.

"He looked at me, says 'oh yeah, I think that'd be okay'. I was f---ing devastated. I thought, at the time, 'well you're not the f---ing man for me'."

Years later she realised the money she'd been earning wasn't going towards bills, but fuelling his drug habit.

"The first night was hard. Really hard. I'd started at six. My first job was in the morning just when it was starting to close. I talked to men all night but I would back off.

"I'd been there 12 hours. I had to do it. Yeah I could have done nothing and not get any but I had to try help us at home. That first night, I tell you, when I finished, I was f---ing wobbly. Just lying there."

The smoking area of Monica's is down a staircase that pedestrians on Queen Street can see. Many peek in. Jeer. A young man yells out "slut office!"

Renee's used to the abuse. She ignores it, but says some of the more emotional ladies don't.

"Who are they to judge us? Really? Instead of calling us prostitutes, whores, sluts – I consider us ladies of the night. It's legal. It's a f---ing job, eh?

"These girls: do you go to a bar? And give it for free? I'm protected in here. I'm using condoms. I'm not doing nothing that I'm going to get myself sick about. They can go to a bar and get totally sloshed, meet some guy and think 'oh, he sounds cool, he looks nice' – and yeah, some of them are – but then you wake up in bed and think 'oh f---!'"

Renee has three children. Her eldest is 25, her second son just turned 17 and her daughter is 12.

Aside from her eldest son, they don't know what she does and think she is unemployed. On nights she works – which don't come that often – she says she is going out with friends.

"My parents don't know. Neither my brother, my sister."

She gestures to the other sex workers: "These are my friends now".

"I do it to pay the bills, to keep a roof over our head and power on, food. And to cater for their needs – extras like clothing, shoes, school; education is so expensive. I go without. I can't afford their wants but their needs I can give to them in little portions.

"I could get no job all night sitting here. You could come in five nights of the week and not get jobs on three. You'd be lucky to get a job one night of the week."

'EXPENSIVE THERAPY'

Popping up around the country are upmarket brothels that charge more and claim to treat their ladies with respect.

Places like Bon Ton. A BBC documentary awarded it the title of 'best brothel in the world'. Its going rate averages about $500 an hour (with kinks costing extra - a dinner date alone costs $350, not including sex).

Clients look at the website or talk to the managers about suitable girls and then book from there.

"It's not like a goldfish tank when you walk in and spy all the girls and take your pick," says the female owner of the new Auckland Bon Ton.

"We pride ourselves on not operating like a zoo."

The owner says there's still a seedy aspect of the sex industry in New Zealand.

"There's brothels where girls just sit around in their lingerie and anyone can walk in off the streets and they chuck down a towel… it's the same as the Warehouse versus Smith and Caughey's."

She can tell when a client is used to lower-end brothels, calling up and making specific, coarse demands.

"I said 'you'll find her at a sex shop sir you can blow her up. You didn't mention anything of a name or a brain or a personality so I figured it wasn't a requirement'. All of a sudden the tune changes and he goes 'oh sorry, I guess that was a bit rude of me'.

"If you allow them to get away with treating girls like pieces of meat then they will. You should show respect for yourself and respect them too. Sure, they're' paying for it, but it doesn't mean you're a victim and they're taking advantage of the situation."

She says she gets no respect for her work.

"A lot of people would think more highly of me if I was selling drugs, which is illegal, but people prefer a drug dealer over a slut dealer. It's the way we've been raised and conditioned."

Sex work is actually pretty boring, she says. A typical client will sit for 10 minutes, break the ice, have a drink and shower.

The actual sexual component is probably ten minutes of the hour, she says.

PRIVATE ESCORTS

At the top of a fancy apartment overlooking the Auckland viaduct is the office (or mini brothel) of escorts Jacky and Vannessa. They have separate houses but come here for work and offer bi-double sessions, advertising on the NZ Girls website.

A 2007 research report by Gilian Abel, which interviewed 773 sex workers, found that in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch (where the majority of sex work happens), 54 per cent work in brothels, 30 per cent work privately and 18 per cent on the streets.

"There was a move following decriminalisation from the brothel sector to the private sector which is reflected in these statistics" says Abel.

Jacky is surprised private escorts don't already outnumber brothel workers.

She had previously worked in brothels Femme Fatale and the famed Flora's, an Auckland red-light institution which closed in 2008.

"The legislation has dramatically affected the parlours because there's so much more competition out there now. That's the way it should be. It gives more power to the girls.

"The only problem with working privately is you have to organise your own advertising, you have to be reasonably business-minded and strict on your hours. You have to provide your own premises, but it's not hard to hire an apartment. It's much more beneficial to work privately – the parlours don't take half your income."

She has charged the same price - $200 an hour - throughout her eight years in private practice. With up to four or five clients a day, her daily earnings can hit $1000.

Most girls advertise on NZ Girls, Jacky says. The website owns the market and workers get discounts for advertising on it exclusively.

She charges an extra $100 for "Greek" (anal sex) and an extra $50 for kissing.

"It's intimate. You can bump uglies with people, but you can keep a distance. You don't have to cuddle. But kissing? Getting your face in somebody else's face? It doesn't really get more intimate than that. Personally I think the two most intimate things you can do is kiss and sleep next to somebody. Everything else is just a handshake."

Beforehand, she worked in IT recruitment with high-up clients. "I left that industry because I was fed up with it. I had a window of opportunity and thought this would be so easy, 11 years and it turns out it still is."

FIRST-TIMER

Back at the Pelican Club, Pippa is preparing to go out to her first job.

King offers some encouragement.

"Pippa, you're so sweet. Just go there and be your sweet self, put your nurse's outfit on and you'll be the cutest nurse in the whole of Auckland."

Pippa comes up to the door, "alright, let me have a smoke and I'll do it".

King: "Don't forget your mints."

* Some names have been changed.

* This article has been edited.