Editorial: Manukau right on prostitution

The Prostitution Reform Act 2003 did not simply decriminalise the sex industry, it also awarded greater control of the trade to local councils. They, in the best interests of the community, gained the power to make bylaws regulating the location of brothels.

The industry could, thus, be confined to areas where it was least likely to cause offence. Brothels would not be situated within eyesight of, say, a school.

Yet the same legislation also decreed that street workers could no longer be arrested for soliciting. They could ply their trade anywhere, no matter the degree of offence.

This has created a conundrum, most notably for the Manukau City Council. It has long regarded street prostitution and its attendant activities as a blight, especially around the notorious hotspot of Hunters Corner. The council must have hoped the act would, as proponents claimed, lead street walkers to recognise the health and safety benefits of working in brothels. If so, it was to be disappointed.

Rather than confining prostitution to certified places, the new law appears to have increased the number of street walkers in Manukau City.

This, it seems, is the easy way around the overheads associated with setting up a place of business.

Decriminalisation means, however, that the council is powerless to prevent soliciting occurring in places where the vast majority of people would not want it to be.

The council tried to use a bylaw to ban street walking but was advised that could contravene the Bill of Rights and the reform act. The council's solution now is legislation, the Manukau City Council (Control of Street Prostitution) Bill, which this week was referred to Parliament's local government select committee.

Thus, it is up to Parliament to examine legislation that, among other things, dictates that prostitutes or their clients can be fined $10,000 for soliciting or loitering in a public place.

Only the Greens and the Maori Party opposed sending the bill to the select committee. The Greens claimed Manukau City was trying to reverse the decriminalisation provisions of the reform act.

That is true to a degree. Yet what the council is actually tackling is an undesirable, open-slather ramification of the act.

In effect, it wants a solution similar to that in some states of Australia, where prostitution is legal but soliciting cannot take place in locations where it causes offence. That seems a reasonable approach.

Where the bill becomes more problematic is in its enforcement. Practices such as street walking and kerb crawling create difficulties of interpretation. Proof can be elusive. To try to overcome that, the bill hands the police considerable power. They are able, for example, to demand information from people if there are "reasonable grounds" to believe they have committed an offence.

Anyone refusing to give information could be fined $5000. The police are also, according to the Greens, given a licence to engage in entrapment.

As much as anything else, this points to the difficulty of policing prostitution. The reform act itself contained provisions that cannot be enforced, the likes, for example, of insisting that brothel owners make clients use condoms. Enforcing the Manukau legislation would create another set of problems.

Yet that is not a reason for ditching the bill. The reform act has brought a degree of control and transparency to the sex industry.

But it erred in failing to recognise that soliciting is not acceptable in all public places. It is fair for councils to be able to acknowledge this within their prostitution parameters.

Others are bound to follow Manukau City's lead.