Kaytlin
Welcome back to The Oldest Profession Podcast. I'm your host, Kaytlin Bailey. This is part two
of a two part episode about how Australia came to decriminalize sex work. So if you have not
yet heard episode one stop, go back. Please listen to that because otherwise this may be
incomprehensible to you.
The quick summation of what we covered in part one of this episode:Australia decriminalized
sex work in pieces, starting with street-based sex work, which caused an immediate social and
political backlash, but ultimately culminating in the decriminalization of all forms of adult
consensual sex work in 1995, both as part of a public health initiative and also as a backlash
against the rampant and well-documented police corruption.
[opening music]
Elena
In 1995, when decriminalization passed in New South Wales, it passed through both Houses of
Parliament with a comfortable, easy majority because both parties supported it. And it was a
huge historic political moment for the movement, even separate to the legislation itself. What it
meant was this is possible, and we're at the beginning of something.
It was very, very meaningful for sex workers everywhere. And for sex workers in New South
Wales, who had been kind of toiling under that yoke of police corruption for a long time, and
street-based sex workers who had momentarily kind of thrown it off and then had been kind of in
a bit of turmoil with local council regulations, it was a huge sigh of relief.
And as a sex worker myself, I can tell you working there in the early 2000s, it's indescribable the
difference of your own work style coming from a criminalized setting where I'd been working in
Perth in Western Australia, and I'd also worked under the licensing setting in Queensland, and
then coming to New South Wales and working under decrim, it just removes the entire stressor
of criminalization.​
Eury
It's been fantastic. One, health and safety for sex workers in a decriminalized environment. It is
a vast improvement on criminalization. These days, in New South Wales, it's not unusual If a
sex worker is abused at work for them to go appeal to the police.
So that there is some sort of trust and working relationship that the police are seen, in some
cases, as being able to use the law to protect you rather than to abuse you, which was certainly
the case, or exploit you, which was the case before decriminalization.
And in 1995, boom, it happened. But the day before it happened, I'll just tell you this little
story—interesting—because it still impacts today. The day before it happened, the attorney
general at that time rang Roberta up and said, “Come in, I want to talk to you.”
So, Roberta, she always wanted to have someone, you know, and I was her kind of her offsider,
I guess, you know? So, myself and this brothel owner, the female brothel owner who I'd worked
for, we, the three of us, sat down and he said, “We're going to do…the announcements going to
be made tonight. We want you guys to know, you know, that's coming out. Blah blah…” Great,
you know, and we had a little look at it and Roberta said..he said, “what do you think?”
And Roberta said, “You’re gonna have trouble. You're going to have trouble with the councils.
You've given nothing to them except the responsibility that's managing a very difficult industry
with nothing, basically.”
To this day, councils are the biggest obstacle to sex work in New South Wales because each
council has the power to recommend license for a brothel. And the councils regulate that
differently. There's very few council that have really embraced the law in the way that it was
intended.
Kaytlin
Yeah, of course. Because not having clearly articulated rules and guidelines creates
opportunities for local councils and governments to get in there and do what they do, which is
try to eradicate sex work.
Elena
But a great problem was that there were no planning regulations put in place and there was no
guidance for local councils as to how they should treat sex work businesses that were already
physically there, or sex work businesses that were opening up or private sex workers who were
working from home.
Work health and safety regulation, local planning regulation, work health and safety regulation is
something sex workers know a lot about. We can engage with those agencies.
But local council is much more of a small, closed shop. It's based on power that is drawn from
elections. It's very much personality-based, but what it endorses is the systemic punch down on
Asian migrant sex workers, primarily, you know. Those of us who are more privileged in sex
work to be able to work indoors can largely sidestep the pointy end of regulation. We might not
be covered by all the protections that a local council could offer, but we're not criminalized.
The other way it mobilized on a local council level is highly racialized because it's the targeting
of workplaces that are run by Asian migrant families or individuals, and the workplaces, the
massage parlors, where a predominantly Asian background migrant workers are working. And
coupled with that, the anti-trafficking movement, which also, highly racialized, it's really the,
migrant sex workers and Asian workplacest that the frontline of anti-sex work sentiment in
Australia and therefore policing.
Kaytlin
It's always so frustrating these, like, racist and xenophobic exceptions that are carved into
decriminalization. But for those that it did apply to, what did we learn? What does the data
show? What impact did decriminalization have?
Elena
What the data shows is that the industry didn't increase or decrease. Some of the
health-seeking behaviors of sex workers changed, particularly migrant sex workers. But for sex
workers of the more privileged set, you know, white women, housed working in establishments
or working privately, that it wasn't the working conditions so much that changed, but willingness
to seek justice and to be less of a kind of sitting duck for crime, I guess you would say, or
extortion or assault or family violence, was something that culturally did shift. Attitudes in police
shifted somewhat. It depended on who you were.
Kaytlin
I really appreciate that. Decriminalization helps sex workers, right? Advocate for their safety and
health, report crimes committed against them. But what does decriminalization look like for the
rest of the community, If you're just, like, in the neighborhood? Eurydice?
Eury
So I live about ten kilometers from the center of Sydney. It's a typical kind of inner city, lively,
suburb, yeah? So on my main, on my main shopping mall, which is just little shops and, you
know, a couple hundred meters of delicatessens, drycleaners, bars, pubs and there are brothels
there that have been there since I was an outreach worker in 1985 on the main suburban street.
But they're not, they're not at street level. They're about street level. So you can imagine these
little, two-story terraces with a little staircase and a little number, because you're still not allowed
to advertise sex work in New South Wales. So in my main street there's around I think about five
or six brothels upstairs.
So I stood outside these brothels with my tape recorder, asking all the people, you know, mums
and dads and kids, anyone who walked past, “Hi, did you know sex work is decriminalized?”
Some people knew. Some people didn't. And then I would say to them, “Do you know that we're
standing right outside a brothel like it's right there?” And I would ask, “And how long have you
lived here? How often do you come here?” Yeah. And, so when you, you know, standing right
just up those stairs. And nobody—I think one person out of about 20 knew that there was a
brothel up there, or one of the shop…and some of the shop owners— they weren’t perturbed by
it.
Yeah. And there is no action on the street there. There were no criminals sitting outside with
tattoos all over them. There was nothing. There is nothing, you know, it's just a happy little
shopping center.
Kaytlin
Yeah, no community complaints. Nothing to see here. Everything was fine.
Eury
And they'd been there for 13 years. So there's a lack of hysteria, I guess, around sex work that I
think has been cultivated by decriminalization.
[break]
Kaytlin
So decriminalization is going well enough in the places that it's being tried that it's spreading to
places nearby. Elena, can you tell me a little bit about how decriminalization is spreading across
Australia?
Elena
So in New South Wales, the legislation passed in 1995, and it came into effect in 1996. Around
the same time, licensing systems were being implemented in Victoria and when Queensland
decided to do their law reform, even though their own, you know, royal commission and other
inquiries had pointed towards decriminalization, they went what they thought was the middle
road and went down the licensing/legalization road as well.
The licensing regimes by all measurements really failed in Australia and some researchers have
argued that actually licensing is worse for sex workers–safety, health, mental health, financial
security, physical security–than criminalization. In 2020, The Northern Territory government,
after many years of campaigning and support from the unions, they also brought in
decriminalization.
They learned the lessons a bit from New South Wales. They brought in some clearer, not great,
but clearer planning regulations. And they also brought in and are still working on like very
strong work, health and safety protections.
In 2022, decriminalization went through parliament in Victoria, and it was implemented in a two
phase process. What that allowed for was for the statewide government and the ministers
involved to set extremely clear, unwavering regulations and for local councils in black and white
in a way that can't be misinterpreted. And so that we believe is going to be a benefit for the way
that decrim lasts over time without building up and giving opposition airtime within local councils
because it's very clear what local councils responsibilities are and what local council
responsibilities aren't in Victoria, so that's great.
Last year the decriminalization bill passed in Queensland, and that was on the back of a seven
year campaign. Decrim implementation began in August 2024 in Queensland.
Kaytlin
And that brings us pretty much up to date on how decrim became the law of the land in many
states across Australia, but now we have to talk about the law online, and I can think of no
better person to bring in for this conversation than our next guest.
Eliza
So my name is Eliza Sorensen. I'm one of the founders of Assembly Four. And we founded
Switter and Tryst.link. I come from an infrastructure and security background, but I am now
co-CEO of Assembly Four and Tryst. And a lot of the work that I do day to day is around the
business operations, the policy and legislative space, and trying to bridge the gap between
technologists and sex workers.
Kaytlin
Very cool.
Eliza
And I should also say that I'm a sex worker. Victoria, which is where I am and Tryst is, we have
been decriminalized technically for, gosh, a year or two, I think now. Prior to that, we were
regulated. Whilst we do have this legislation to fall back, Victoria is the only one and I think
Queensland and maybe Northern Territory off the top of my head that have some form of
anti-discrimination protections.
One of the biggest issues that we face is the laws are fractured within Australia. So we have
Northern Territory, Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria, which are under some form of
decriminalization. There are a few things that are missing, like protections for migrant workers.
And how you advertise and where you can work.
Kaytlin
Even in places where decriminalization has been achieved, sex workers still have to deal with
all of the new online regulations that threaten all of our privacy and freedom of expression.
Eliza, can you explain what we're up against?
Eliza
So in Australia, we've, for the last five or so years, been fighting against something called the
Online Safety Act, which came into law in 2021. And one of the big things is it starts to place
basic expectations on every platform, regardless of size, around how they conduct their
business on the internet. So as an individual independent sex worker, you also have to be
aware of these laws and one of the things that has come in late last year, which the Australian
government pushed through Parliament within 18 hours, essentially was the age verification,
anyone under 16 would be limited from social media platforms and things like this under the
guise that, you know, trying to reduce harm.
We know that isolating teenagers from access to information on these platforms doesn't make
them safer, but it does make the internet unsafe for a lot of adults, separately, when you do
require ID or an assurance mechanism, which can be quite flawed. Our government hasn't got a
real plan, but age verification assurance, the various different mechanisms that a platform has to
verify or assure someone's age on entering a web page can be quite expensive. If you are a
smaller site, you can be looking at anywhere from 25% to $10 an attempt. So for larger or, like,
on the way to being larger platforms, independent platforms, that's a real hit.
But as an independent sex worker who's running my own site, that's a lot of technical upkeep.
That's a lot of cost. So when we kind of think about decriminalization of sex work, we have
decriminalization of sex work offline but not online. We don't have the same protections or right
to commerce as other industry does by virtue of being adult.
Kaytlin
Can you talk a little bit about the way that these laws, or rather the implementation of these laws
creates new vulnerabilities for adult users?
Eliza
There is also, do you trust this third party vendor with this information of I'm assuring that I'm 18
and I am visiting a porn website, I am visiting a queer sexual health website. All of these things
are really sensitive information in the grand scheme of how we live our day to day lives. And if
we look at the political climate, particularly in the United States at the moment, it is not safe to
be a queer person. It is not a safe place to be a woman who is looking for medical advice
around abortions and birth control.
So a lot of these mechanisms can also be used against us as individuals who are trying to go
about our day to day lives in a very real way. I am queer. I grew up in rural Australia. There
wasn't a lot of acceptance or information about queer life in general. And for me, having access
to the internet under the age of 16 to other people who had already been through something
similar was not only life changing but life saving.
As a sex worker, we are inherently a marginalized community. There's also payment processing,
which has made this much harder to actually achieve. So there's–as a sex worker giving up IDs
is hard and not a…
KB
It's not a small ask.
Eliza
It's not a small ask. That aspect that's going back to the other aspect of what happens if you
don't have I.D.. What happens if you have a temporary I.D. with everything that's going on in the
United States? I have seen cases where people have had their IDs sent ripped up to them
because of the executive order around gender markers.
So the things, such as banking, have been a big problem for a lot of people like being able to
keep bank accounts, being able to get credit card facilities or even just EFTPOS facilities,
brothels, adult clubs, things like that.
I would say that decriminalization does make a lot of things easier for us, but it hasn't stopped
the or hasn't changed attitudes towards sex work just yet, in a lot of ways. I think you've still got
a lot of peoples in policing and health care that still don't understand sex work just yet. So
they're coming at it with very outdated ideas of sex work and the harms it potentially causes.
Kaytlin
Of course, you know a ton about this both as a sex worker and also as one of the founders of
Tryst and Assembly for and of Switter. Can you tell me a little bit about how all of that
happened?
Eliza
So Assembly Four was created by myself, Lola Hunt, and our other founder, Chendo.Assembly
Four was founded with this idea that we want to build things that make sex workers’ lives easier
and without the exorbitant price tags that are usually put on to the adult and the sex industry.
We wanted it to be a mechanism for us to also start conversations because, as we're speaking
about in the past is technology gets used against marginalized communities first before it goes,
you know, across the board and in order for us to actually fight these changes to get protective
legislation put in, we do need to have allies outside of our own community.
So we've been able to build really fantastic alliances with other organizations, particularly in the
digital rights space around the right to privacy, the right to delete your information. The
fundamental right to information access and personhood. And we've certainly seen with, you
know, in Australia where we have the electronic frontiers, Australia, Digital Rights Australia, in
the US, you've got, the Electronic Frontiers Foundation and so many others, Fight for the
Future, who are doing some really amazing work that is human rights focused, but that has not
just sex workers’ rights, but sexuality rights-informed information. And I think one of the
campaigns that really do come to mind is around the right to healthcare information and abortion
information.
​
We released Switter, and that came at a really pivotal time where FOSTA-SESTA was about to
come into play and in order to support Switter which just blew up. It really…
Kaytlin
Tell us, for listeners that don't know, what is Switter?
Eliza
Sorry, I think, I completely forgot about that part. So Switter was a sex worker instance hosted
through an open source software called Mastodon. It would allow an individual to create their
own social media platform and link it to other instances. When we did decide to close Switter,
we had just over 420,000 users, and it was done in order to ensure the longevity of Tryst, as
there were some age verification laws that were looming. You know, a lot of people lost their
ability to advertise and we hacked something together on Switter, but it wasn't fit for purpose.
Not for, you know, I think 250,000 users at that point in time.
Kaytlin
Right, it's what the community needed.
Eliza
Yeah, absolutely. And we thought that it was the best way to create something that wasn't like
the other advertising platforms because Lola and I, in particular, would see the platforms
charging like $1,000 a month for basic access.
Chendo and I had been working together at that point for about five or six years at various other
startups, and it was, what happens if we treat this exactly like a tech product and we bring it
back?
And this started to open up a lot of interesting avenues around discussion of, oh, our platform
doesn't allow sex workers, our service provider. Like we got, kicked off Cloudflare. I think we
were the first non-Nazis to be done. So there's a lot of these instances that kind of came up,
which really, got the tech community also involved with some of the really damaging aspects of
FOSTA-SESTA and how that was impacting service providers decisions.
Kaytlin
Right, it also really, I think, helps that I feel like the tech industry is such a key ally on this and
like the next frontier, because I mean, the history shows us that, like, the tools that are forged,
against us are inevitably used on, like, larger and larger swaths. And I think, you know, you don't
have to…it was just looking at, like, the way that power is going, I feel like more tools for, like,
censorship and surveillance is, like, not like the best goal.
Eliza
No, not at all, I think it's one of those things if we look back through history, we know that the
collection and use of personal information to strongarm or discredit people is there. AndI'm a
firm believer in regardless of who is in power, can you trust the next person? And we shouldn't
trust the any government I think with that information, because history shows us that it does get
used against marginalized communities to stop political activism.
So when we founded Tryst, we did so in order to not only financially sustain Switter, but to also
build something fit for purpose around sex worker advertising, because we hacked something
together and it was for Switter and it wasn't going to scale when we did this. One of the key
aspects for us was in order to make sure that Tryst as a platform, or any sex worker platform,
could stick around for a long time, it meant that we had to not only be loud about our activism,
but we had to be a part of our own community.
Kaytlin
I understand that Tryst is forced by a combination of, like, banking and state and, like, various
policies and regulations that your hand is forced in collecting the information. What about the
other side in terms of, like, are there subpoenas from jurisdictions where sex work is
criminalized, like, do you guys have to interact with law enforcement?
Eliza
Yeah.
Kaytlin
How vulnerable is this information, I guess?
Eliza
So we've got some additional information in our knowledge base, which kind of goes a bit more
into depth about, like, how long we keep things. But as a worker, as soon as your ID has been
approved, it gets deleted and we keep a stub of, like, you were this age when we reviewed the
ID, it came from this form, like, driver's license, passport, issuer. And it was approved by one of
the people on our team at what time.
In terms of subpoenas, because of the Australia and American alliances that are in place,
there's something called, like, the Mutual Law Treaty Agreement. And this means that the US
government can go through our governments to issue subpoenas as well. One of the things that
is really important is we require a valid judiciary subpoena in order to even access or request
information.
It is not just, a police officer can reach out to us and go, “I want this person's information” and a
lot of the time they don't meet the burden that the judiciary is looking for. I would say that the
rare subpoenas that we have received aren't for independent sex workers. It is typically
involving serious crimes.
Kaytlin
Something that you would want to cooperate with.
Eliza
Yes. And there have been instances where sex workers have been victims of crimes, and
they've actually reached out and given us the information of officers, for example, or lawyers
who will be contacting us in order to deliver a subpoena. But as a part of our general process, it
has to be valid. It has to be very targeted. And there are instances where it is appropriate for us
to push back legally.
And I think it can be really easy to say that, you know, we are just a company. But we’re a
company built of sex workers and technologists and activists who deeply care and believe that
we deserve, sex workers deserve, access to platforms without stigma or discrimination. And in
order for that to happen, we need things across the board to change. We need internet
legislation to change. We need banking legislation to change. We need anti-discrimination
protections so we can go to these institutes and go, “Well, no, it's not okay that you're treating
us like this.”
Every adult or sex industry professional I know have been some of the smartest individuals who
are so aware of the potential harms that can occur not just in our industry but in any industry.
And I think everyone is so motivated in making a world where we can actually talk about those
issues and actually try and put in real mitigations rather than things that are being handed down
by people who don't understand our industry, don't understand harm reduction.
I think, one of the biggest things about the, I don't know, the sex industry, but also at Tryst, I
think that particularly with the content team, there has been a real drive to ensure that we have
a place where we can tell the the amazing parts of the sex worker community, but also thenot so
great parts of like I don’t want to work, like it's got nothing to do with sex work. I just don't dream
of labor. We get to celebrate the diversity and our experiences and actually have a place where
we aren't there as inspiration porn. We get to be fully faceted human beings. And I think that is
one of the most beautiful things about the people who work at Tryst is they hold various
identities and together we get to try to build something better. We're all people, and sometimes
we don't make, you know, the right choices. But we hope to do better. We want to learn from our
mistakes.
Kaytlin
Thank you. Thank you for sitting down with me. And thank you for the work that you do.
Everyone that I had the opportunity to speak to for this podcast is an inspiration. They are part
of a long and proud legacy of sex workers coming together to make things better, not just for
their immediate community, but for all of us, for the generations that will come after us.
And what stood out to me in this episode, and what I think is so inspiring about it, is the absolute
power of people in a community standing together, pulling their resources and directing their
focus. Sex workers across New South Wales built communities, first with each other, and then
they made inroads into the halls of power and made real change happen.
I think it's also important to remember the sobering words of advocates that have come before
us, how important it is to stay vigilant against racism and xenophobia, and local regulatory
efforts that seek to undermine our gains. And keeping Eliza's words in mind as we see the
surveillance state grow all around us and all over the world. Sex workers know how to keep
each other safe, and we have much to teach the rest of the world.
And of course, you don't have to be a member of this community. You don't have to be
somebody who has ever bought or sold sexual services to understand how important these
rights are, not just for harm reduction efforts, although those are important, but also for our
foundational freedoms.
[closing music]