ROSS FITZGERALD shares some of the highlights from the new book A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Sex Party, written by Canberrans Robbie Swan and Fiona Patten.

As it happens, in 2016 I was the lead NSW Senate candidate for the Australian Sex Party and came within a whisker of beating Fred Nile’s Christian Democrats.

The Sex Party was founded by Fiona Patten, a highly paid sex worker to the stars, and her long-time partner, Robbie Swan, who had previously run the Canberra-based adult industry lobby group, the Eros Foundation.

This past week, I received a copy of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Sex Party. Written by Swan and Patten, the book follows their unlikely journey, culminating in Patten’s election to the Victorian Parliament in November 2014.

During her eight years in the state’s Upper House, when the Sex Party was renamed the Reason Party, Patten chaired the Legal and Social Issues Committee.

She played a key role in landmark reforms, including voluntary assisted dying, abortion law reform, the decriminalisation of sex work and the legalisation of ride-sharing services, including Uber.

The book opens with an intriguing account of Swan meeting Liberal Party heavyweight Bronwyn Bishop for the first time in the late 1980s and her reaction to discovering he was a lobbyist for the sex industry. Her response was not what many people might think.

The life and times of a Canberra masseuse in the late 1980s offers one of the most challenging ethical debates in the book, as well as a blow-by-blow description of what it’s like to work in a massage parlour.

A hilarious profile of the late former Labor senator Mal Colston shows just how rampant political horse-trading can be in our parliaments and how often it goes unreported. The story also describes a hilarious altercation in which an enraged Colston gut-butts Swan.

Swan’s addiction to political stunts goes all the way back to his days in Canberra during the 1980s, when he edited the political humour and satire magazine Matilda, for which I was a regular contributor.

His breach of the old ASIO building precinct in the Canberra suburb of Campbell to film background material for a porn movie is utterly surreal and could surely not happen again, given all the security protocols around the new building on Constitution Avenue.

Swan’s dialogue with an ASIO agent inside the building is reminiscent of a scene from the 1960s US spy spoof Get Smart.

Swan’s direction of two porn stars around the High Court and Canberra’s City Police Station precincts to create a storyboard for an X-rated film is a delight. The subsequent publication of a set of photos in Australian Hustler makes the heist even more astonishing.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Sex Party also describes the appalling way in which NSW Liberal premier Robert Askin’s vice squad extorted individuals attempting to establish businesses in the emerging sex industry of the ’60s and ’70s.

Swan and Patten reveal how John Howard’s biographer, David Barnett, who had previously been press secretary to Malcolm Fraser, helped save X-rated films in Australia.

Barnett was a true liberal Liberal who saw the censorship of erotic films as anathema to the party’s stance on freedom of choice and individual liberty.

The book outlines how, at the same time as Barnett was writing Howard’s biography, he was actively advising the Canberra sex industry on how to stop the Liberal Party from banning its products and services.

An avid reader of bodice-ripper fiction, Barnett always maintained that erotic novels were a step above videos and magazines. Before he died, he published his own magnum opus, Roxanne, under the pseudonym EN Stewart.

Swan, Patten and I are among the very few people who knew about Barnett’s love of the genre and just how unusual his book was in the annals of erotic fiction.

For the record, in 1994 my explicit novel, Soaring, was awarded the Eros Foundation’s Erotic Novel of the Year award.

How things have changed. As a profitable industry, porn is now on its knees, largely because so many people are filming and freely distributing their own erotic material!

Ross Fitzgerald AM is emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University. 

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