 It's a rights-based organisation. We started in 1987 as sex workers to manage our own response, really, to pressures related to the police, the law, HIV and AIDS. We support sex workers and advocate for them and their jobs and make sure that they've got a safe place where they can come to and just talk about how their day's been, you know, what it's like putting up with the clients, putting on condoms, exiting the sex industry, what to do when you want to leave the sex industry. What do you think about this debate on the language? Like, what's worse, do you use sex worker or prostitution? Does it have any significance? You know, language comes and goes. I think the association of the word prostitute and prostitution is offensive to a whole generation of sex workers. So we prefer the term sex worker and we prefer to talk about sex work. Do you have any estimates on how many people work in this sex industry? The last time there was done a count of the number of sex workers, it was around about 3,500. 80% of sex work takes place in brothels, indoors. Around about 17% of sex work takes place on the streets. Of those working indoors, two-thirds work in brothels and one-third work privately for themselves. What was the situation before the new regulation was adopted in New Zealand? Okay. Prior to decriminalisation in 2003, it was illegal to receive money for sex. You could be a sex worker, but you couldn't get paid for it. It was illegal to solicit. It was illegal to keep our owner brothel. It was illegal to procure someone into sex work and it was illegal to live off the earnings of a sex worker. We used to be arrested, taken to court, charged and convicted. Our name would be in the paper. It would mean that our name would be attached forever to prostitution. So if we were looking for alternate work, it would sometimes pop up as part of our police record. What about a new legislation? How does it regulate the industry? When sex workers decriminalised in New Zealand, all the old laws penalising sex workers and sex workers were removed from the law books. So brothel keeping disappeared. Living off the earnings disappeared. Procuring disappeared and soliciting disappeared. So nobody can be charged with any of those anymore. Righted at the heart of the law, it talks about protecting the rights of sex workers. You are protected by labour law and that's very important. Every piece of legislation applies to you. So occupational, safety and health legislation, the human rights legislation, all these sorts of laws are available. Standard laws in relation to employment laws, employment contracts, all that came into effect. And most sex workers who are working for brothel may have some form of employment contract. Some city councils make district plans to control where bars can be, for example. And these same things are used to control the location of brothels. You're allowed legally to be a brothel operator. You must have a brothel operator certificate and you file that with the court. A number of sex workers work by themselves. Some of them will work in small collectives of sex workers with maybe two or three other people working with them. They are just in charge of themselves. They just share the expenses for advertising, the expenses for the apartment. Nobody's taking any money off them. In relation to police, our relationship with the police is very good. We discuss, we network with the police on the policy level as well as on the front-line level as well. Usually when a law changes, sex workers are treated like children. And governments say, okay, we'll tolerate a certain kind of sex work. And usually they do what we refer to as a legalised model, where they say, we will licence. They say, okay, we'll do that. And they say, okay, we'll do that. We'll do a legalised model where they say, we will licence. People, you know, brothel operators will licence individual sex workers and we'll have the microscope on them and police them. In New Zealand, we rejected that model completely and utterly. And we said that it was important that sex workers be allowed to maintain, you know, to control over their own sex work, because they have as many options as possible. If they want to work together, that's fine as equals. If they want to work in a managed brothel, that's fine. That's okay. If they want to be street-based sex workers, that's also okay. So that model of having a third party take charge or control sex workers was rejected. Is there any evaluation of the decriminalisation law in New Zealand? The law was evaluated properly in 2007, 2008. The results of that evaluation were published by the Constitutional Law Review Committee, by the Christchurch School of Medicine and by the Crime and Justice Research Centre at Victoria University. All of them found that the law, the current law, which decriminalised sex work, is working in favour of sex workers and it has increased their occupational safety and health, it has increased their protections and it has increased their human rights. They found, doing a comparison between the old law and the new law, that private sex workers are far more able to refuse a client than they were before. For the street-based sex workers, a client didn't refuse to pay the money. The sex worker rang the police. The client had to get the money out of the ATM machine, pay the sex worker. So these are the positive things. We had a situation where a sex worker, a group of sex workers had a problem with a brothel operator and they were, you know, he was asking them questions and the sex worker said, actually, I don't need to tell you this information. I've given it to the receptionist and I feel that you're sexually harassing me as a brothel operator and I have rights and she lodged a complaint with the Human Rights Commission and they awarded her $25,000 in damages for sexual harassment inside the brothel and they said to the brothel operator, okay, you clearly don't know what sexual harassment is and you need to have some training. You can still be a brothel operator but you just need to train and you need to pay her $25,000. Are there many complaints from sex workers for working brothels on, like, exploitation? Because the law changed. It doesn't mean exploitation stops in a workplace if it's being exploited. Some sex workers say, look, I want to make a stand or I want to stop this practice and I have rights and I'm going to do it and they do it whereas others might just say, oh, it's easier to just change workplaces. Yes, there is still some forms of violence against sex work but lifting a law does not prevent violence from happening. Putting a law into place does not prevent violence from happening. The thing is sex workers can now complain to the police if violence doesn't happen and as a result it gets reported more and as a result the police are able to take more details and arrest the person who is ultimately responsible for that violence. Some people say that most people in the sex industry are victims. What do you think about this? Well, I think of course you're a victim if the police are arresting you. The law tends people into victims if it's illegal. You know, there are sex workers who are certainly in situations that are not good, that are dangerous and could be improved on but even so they may not say that it's sex work that is creating their situation of hardship. They'd say that perhaps it's sex work that's alleviating the hardship for them. 773 sex workers were interviewed in New Zealand and it was found that a tiny percentage said that they had been released. There are claims about trafficking and everything like that but the New Zealand Immigration Service goes through brothels on a regular basis looking for people who are trafficked. They have never found a person who has been trafficked ever since decriminalisation came into effect. That's 10 years ago last year. The New Zealand police have never found any evidence of trafficking within the sex industry. They are more likely to find evidence of forced employment or coercive employment in fisheries and in agriculture, viticulture, than they are within the sex industry. Are you showing migration and issuing the sex industry? Very much. It's unfortunate because you cannot come to New Zealand if you want to be a sex worker. So that measure was put in place at the time by the immigration minister who said it was an effective way to stop trafficking and what has happened is that we have a population of sex workers who are migrants, who are working illegally and that makes it difficult for them. It means that they could be deported. So really migration laws should apply to sex workers in the same way because the very reason that part of the law was put there was to stop trafficking and yet we would say it actually helps people end up in exploitative positions because they can't speak out because they're illegal. So it's a contradiction. What do you think about this so-called Swedish model which is more and more popular in Europe that's there punishing the clients of sex workers? We're really pleased it hasn't made its way to the Pacific. I think it's an appalling situation for sex workers. I remember working illegally as a young woman and we'd do anything to get our clients. Just shift the law on to them. Look, we would have to duck and hide and go into places that we'd prefer not to define them. I think it's not a good situation for sex workers. I think it's really harmful and if these governments are considering prosecuting the client's thought about why they're doing this that really they should be looking to protect and assist and support sex workers and not to make their situation more precarious.