Vic MP in sex club ‘research’

A Victorian Liberal MP and former erotic poet has told fellow parliamentarians of the research trip he made to a gay sex-on-premises venue.

Bruce Atkinson told The Age he was horrified by the unsafe sex practices he saw at the venue.

I spent maybe five or 10 minutes in the venue; some of the venue is just a passive recreation area where alcohol is served -¦ but there were sections which were available for sexual encounters and some of those horrified me, he said.

You have 30 or 40 men who were engaged in all sorts of sexual acts and it was dark and they couldn’t possibly tell who they were involved with.

Atkinson said he visited the premises out of concern for rising HIV figures, and in the wake of newspaper reports suggesting some HIV-positive Victorian men were deliberately infecting others.

The MP said he was given a condom as he entered the premises.

Victorian opposition leader Ted Baillieu told reporters this week he applauded his colleague’s openness about the issue.

Our HIV rates in Victoria are now back to levels around 1997, the government’s approach has been to put a stop on advertising which was going to deal with this issue again and I think Bruce is rightly drawing attention to that, he said.

Meantime, federal health minister Tony Abbott has called for an investigation into whether a national strategy for dealing with cases of deliberate HIV transmission was required.

Former health minister and current head of the Ministerial Advisory Committee on AIDS Michael Wooldridge told reporters recent cases reported in Victoria and South Australia showed the systems in place at the moment are not working.

But director of health promotion in the NSW Department of Health Kerry Chant told Sydney Star Observer she was confident the state’s current system was working. The Star recently revealed there were no current investigations into people alleged to be deliberately infecting others in NSW.

ACON CEO Stevie Clayton said she had mixed feelings about Abbott’s call for a national strategy, given the sensational media reports about cases in Victoria, South Australia and Queensland.

Certainly it would be beneficial to have national uniform laws, because right now we don’t even have uniform criminal laws or the same public health laws, Clayton said.

Having those gaps fixed would be good, but the problem in setting up in a climate of hysteria is there’s a risk that what’s going to come out of that process will actually set us back.