If you can think of a better name for the Australian Sex party than the Australian Sex party, Fiona Patten would like to hear it – really she would. Now that the party is five years old and Patten its first elected representative, she thinks it might have outgrown its “look at me” name.



Patten was a failed candidate four times before winning an upper house seat in the Victorian poll in November. She wants to be taken seriously now on a raft of issues from drug reform to voluntary euthanasia, from small business to abortion rights.

“I met someone on Monday night who said, ‘I agree with every one of your policies but I couldn’t vote for you because of your name,’ and that’s not the first time I’ve heard that,” says Patten in her sparse temporary office behind parliament in Melbourne.



“I will change the name when we find a better one. I think the whole of the party is supportive of that position. Find us a better one.”



The evolution from being the political arm of the Eros Association, the adult sex industry lobby group, to a rounded party seeking law reform from inside the system has been largely Patten’s doing, along with her partner, Robbie Swan, who, incidentally, was just pipped by Jacqui Lambie for the fifth Senate seat in Tasmania.

Patten was a founder of Eros in 1992, was its chief executive until she won her seat and has been the Sex party’s leader since it launched in 2009. The party is not running candidates in the New South Wales election because it threw all its small resources into getting Patten elected in Victoria.



She is now 50. She was always the energetic and reassuring face of the sex industry – a stylish dresser, articulate, female. But during the campaign, she wore the party’s garish T-shirts with their slogan: “Vote 1: SEX” as though the whole thing was a bit “hee hee”. In truth, Patten is an experienced policy lobbyist and is not out of her depth in her new job.



She knows many of the state’s politicians or their staffers: “I’ve sent thousands of letters to this place over the years.”



And Patten’s vote matters. The new Labor government’s task of negotiating its program through the upper house is as complicated as the Coalition’s in Canberra. There are five minor-party MPs plus five Greens, and the government needs the votes of seven of them if the Coalition opposes its legislation.



Patten is feeling her way. She’s been called a leftwing libertarian, but if there is any philosophy, it seems to be about drawing attention to political hypocrisy on social issues. “Libertarian without the civil in front of it becomes a little bit crazy Tea Party to me. I do believe in government, and I do believe in safety nets and I do believe governments can play a role in equality, but I wouldn’t say I’m from the left either.”



Patten hands out how-to-vote cards in Melbourne in 2010 for the federal election. Photograph: Julian Smith/AAP

Her “one big-ticket item” is voluntary euthanasia, which opinion polls consistently show is supported for terminally ill people, but which politicians shy away from, she believes, because of a fear of an organised religious backlash.

“I have a Catholic premier [Daniel Andrews], I have a Catholic deputy premier [James Merlino], but I do believe we are ready for this conversation and, privately, a number of the members of parliament have expressed that to me.” She intends pushing for it to be referred to the Victorian Law Reform Commission.

The cost of the failed war on drugs

She sees more hypocrisy in police and politicians and health professionals knowing the “war against drugs” is lost, but not being game to try something else. It was this issue that first got her interested in politics. Patten had a degree in fashion design from the University of Canberra and set up her own store in the 1980s. Many of her clients were sex workers and she began advocating for their health and safety.

That led to running a needle exchange program in Canberra during the HIV and Aids crisis, and her first lobbying job with the Aids Council. She visited countless brothels, teaching sex workers about safe sex and the risk of HIV and Aids.



Two years ago Patten travelled to Portugal to see for herself the impact of its radical drug reforms. Since 2001 personal drug use has been decriminalised. Dealing and trafficking in drugs remains illegal, but those caught with 10 day’s supply or less of any illegal drug – marijuana, heroin, cocaine, crystal meth – come before a commission to discuss treatment options. It been a success, with deaths from HIV and drug use declining.

Patten wants the Portugal experiment tried here. She argues for marijuana to be legalised and taxed like alcohol; other illicit drugs should be decriminalised for personal use, with the focus on drugs as a health issue rather than a crime.

“What was really interesting in Portugal was a guy with two grams of cocaine was dealt with in an hour and three pieces of paper. You look at how we would deal with a guy caught with cocaine. Even if he got a suspended sentence there would be a ream of paper, lawyers involved, police, judges, the cost of that compared to what they’re doing in Portugal. The savings that they make in enforcement are spent on health.”

Patten is willing to talk about her own drug use. She has used marijuana recreationally, and says: “I still would smoke an occasional joint.” She has tried cocaine and ecstasy. She has never used heroin: “I have had friends die of heroin”.



“There’s a lot of hypocrisy about this. If we don’t speak about it we continue the lie that the drug user is that person breaking into your car, or acting like a lunatic on public transport, whereas there are many hundreds of thousands of drug users in our society who have jobs, who are judges, policeman, politicians.”



None of these policies began as Eros Association concerns. What did spur the party’s formation was the former communications minister Stephen Conroy’s attempts to introduce a mandatory internet filter. The aim was to prevent Australians from accessing sites containing child abuse material, but the proposal went much further, and could have stopped the viewing of regular graphic pornography as well as euthanasia and fringe religious sites.

That would have harmed Eros’s members and was the “last straw” for Patten. An adult’s right to view adult material might have been her job with Eros, but it is also part of her own feminism. She’s a 70s child, from a time when women were claiming their right to enjoy sex for pleasure and resisting censorship of sexual material for adults. Today the debates are more complicated, with the proliferation of sometimes extreme pornography on the internet leading to a feminist schism. Some decry pornography as inherently violent towards women. Similarly, while Patten wants prostitution to be regulated like any other business, some feminists – along with conservative religious groups – insist it is violent and exploitative of women.

In her maiden speech to parliament, Patten noted that, “I may be the first former sex worker to be elected to a parliament anywhere in this country, although no doubt the clients of sex workers have been elected in much greater numbers before me.”

Posters for the Australian Sex party outside a polling booth during the Victorian election campaign. Photograph: Christopher Talbo/AAP

Her experience as a sex worker was brief, but she has no regrets. In 1990 she was visiting a Canberra brothel as an outreach worker. The brothel was shortstaffed and a client had been waiting a long time. “I said, ‘Oh, I’ll do it.’ It was a snap decision, but I don’t regret it for a second.” She tried it a second time in Cairns a couple of years later to help her pay for a scuba diving course. She enjoyed it and she got paid.

She acknowledges that women with heroin addictions would not often choose to be sex workers. And she accepts that parts of the porn industry are “incredibly sexist”. “But I don’t think that images of people having sex or people having sex for financial gain is inherently exploitative or objectifies anyone. That basic premise I don’t support. “

“I’m definitely a feminist. I don’t have a problem if [academic] Sheila Jeffreys or [commentator] Melinda Tankard Reist don’t want to watch porn and think that any image of sex or sexuality of a female is objectification. I don’t agree with them but if they don’t want to look at it, fine. I do think that they’re taking a very nanny state approach to this. My personal and professional position is that censorship is never the answer to sexism.”

The Greens and ‘anti-sex feminism’

The party has much in common with the Greens on social issues but there have been skirmishes over what Patten says is an “anti-sex feminism” element in the Greens. The Greens candidate for the seat of Richmond, Kathleen Maltzahn, promotes the so-called Swedish model of reform, which criminalises the clients of prostitutes. Sex worker groups say it effectively bans the industry and makes workers less safe.

The Greens declined to comment for this story but there are always snipes about the Sex party’s agenda in representing the sex industry. Its political agenda has broadened but its funding is still overwhelmingly from Eros, which represents mainly adult stores and websites. It donated almost $240,000 to the party in 2013-14, the only donor listed by the Australian Electoral Commission. Patten says there are many smaller donations now – which don’t have to be disclosed – and crowdfunding has also raised money. The Victorian campaign cost about $170,000, with 70% coming from Eros.

Patten stresses that Eros does not represent brothels so she is not pushing its member’s commercial interests when she argues for Victoria’s complicated laws on prostitution to be overhauled. “I certainly think that sex work should be treated as any other work and this incredible over-regulation of the industry sets up an illegal industry because people can’t work effectively and profitably within the rules.

“You can only have six rooms in a brothel. You can’t serve alcohol in a brothel. If you run a successful business you can’t open another one. There’s no reason for any of those regulations. They don’t make the industry safer. They have no effect apart from the government feeling good that they’re not endorsing the industry.”

Patten would also decriminalise street prostitution, which remains an offence in Victoria, unlike NSW which effectively legalised prostitution in 1995.

“I’ve worked in brothels, I’ve been on outreach to hundred of brothels, I’ve met thousands of sex workers, I’ve met hundreds of adult performers,” she says. “I’ve yet to see someone as damaged as other people purport them to be … the adult performers that I’ve met have all done it actively and willingly. I really haven’t seen another side to it – no doubt there is, and that probably has less to do with the industry and more to do with the gender imbalance in our society.”

She is incredulous about the reaction to the Fifty Shades of Grey movie, with its male-dominant BDSM themes. The TV presenter Lisa Wilkinson called it the “worst movie I have ever seen”, with the the female character Anastasia Steele “[selling] women across the world short”. Domestic violence campaigners and religious groups protested against the film, insisting that Fifty Shades is “domestic abuse”.

“Millions of women have read it and enjoyed it,” says Patten with an exasperated look. “It’s incredibly sexist that somehow women have not got the agency to make those decisions, that the poor dainty female is not able to deal with this material and therefore it’s wrong. The fact is that when you look at the BDSM industry, there are far more females dominatrix than there are males – I’d say it would be four to one in the industry.”



Patten knows her vote will be important on some issues, and irrelevant on others. She sees her role as shifting the debate, putting a view that might not otherwise be put, challenging some hypocrisy if she can. She has had meetings with the government and the opposition and is getting to know her fellow crossbenchers, a mixed bunch from Shooters and Fishers to the Democratic Labor part. At some point, she’ll decide whether the name is holding her party back. “I would like to be called the Liberal party, the actual Liberal party,” she says with a smile.

