Senator ALSTON (Communications, Information Technology and the Arts) (10:04 PM) —I think a pretty reasonable starting test would be to look at the marketplace. People offering these services presumably will want to advertise them so that people will utilise them, and the form of words will be a pretty big give away as to the true nature of the service. If you are interested in a sex line service and there are ads to that effect, you are hardly likely to ring up a counselling service, and vice versa: if you are genuinely interested in counselling, why would you ring a sex line service? So I think there will be a high degree of self-selection.

Where it comes to an obligation on carriers, it is only right and reasonable that carriers should have to make the initial judgment. It is not terribly difficult at the present time. No carrier has said to us, `We have enormous difficulty in determining genuine from purported sex counselling services.' The argument is simply whether or not it is onerous to require them to have certain obligations and what the impact of that regime might be. But I do not think anyone has seriously argued that you cannot tell the difference. Senator Margetts might not. Maybe they use naughty words and talk about rude things on counselling lines and, therefore, as far as she is concerned, there is no difference between counselling and sexual gratification. But I would have thought most carriers would be able to understand the difference quite readily.