Senator ALSTON (Communications, Information Technology and the Arts) (10:02 PM) —Because therapeutic or counselling services provided by medical practitioners, on their face, are highly unlikely to be providing telephone sex services, whereas—

Senator Margetts —Touche, on their face; you have just proved my point. So why is it necessary to exempt them in law, and how are the rest of the people going to prove that they are not—

Senator ALSTON —The rest of the people do not have to prove anything. If they simply say to the carrier, `This is the service we are providing; we are not a sex service,' and the carrier satisfies itself that that is so, it is not regarded as a sex service and it does not have to comply. It is pretty straightforward. Perhaps you think there is a lineball difference between `counselling' and `providing information with the sole or principal object of deriving sexual gratification'—that does not sound very much like counselling to me.

I would have thought there is likely, in practice, to be the world of difference between counselling, which is probably likely to take quite a period of time, and telephone sex services, which I imagine are pretty short and sweet—particularly if they are timed local calls. So, in practice, there should not be any difficulty in distinguishing between the two. Any genuine service would have no difficulty in satisfying a carrier that it was legitimate and would, therefore, not be caught by the legislation.