The exchange (reproduced below) of Facebook correspondence over the past week or so between myself and the Australian Socialist Alliance co-convenor Peter Boyle, on the subject of Alliance policy relating to erotica and pornography, arose from a question about Alliance policy on this issue that I put to Boyle during the discussion following his presentation of the new draft Socialist Alliance programme: 'Towards a Socialist Australia', at an Alliance/Resistance-sponsored, one-day, socialist educational conference held at the Activist Centre in East Perth a couple of weekends ago. Some background material on this issue, and on the question of my expulsion last year from the Alliance, which apparently ensued from my publicly-expressed opposition to the ideas presented from the platform at a Socialist Alliance forum held in Fremantle last year on the topic: 'Raunch Culture, Porn and Women's Liberation', where the desirability of doing away with the circulation of practically all sexual images in the public media was broadly canvassed and upheld, is accessible on the Perth Indymedia site, under the title 'DSP caucus expels dissident WA Socialist Alliance member'. Other documents relating to this matter, which were once available on the previously-existing Perth Indymedia site, but which have apparently been lost, will be made accessible again, on the new site, before long.
The title of the Resistance document presented at a NOWSA (Network of Women Students in Australia) national conference in the mid-1990s, mentioned in the correspondence below, is 'Pornography: Silence or Choice', and is accessible under that title on the internet. The argument in this Resistance document, which presumably reflected Democratic Socialist Party policy in the mid-1990s when it was drafted, is strongly opposed to any concept of suppressing 'porn'. Peter Boyle maintained at the recent educational conference in Perth that the Socialist Alliance had no policy on the question of erotica and pornography. But he said nothing about the long-standing policy of his own current within the Alliance (the ex-DSP) on the issue.
Boyle's reply over the weekend to the Facebook messages I sent to him last week maintains that I myself am 'just not well enough'. This attitude is clearly not appropriate for a serious revolutionary socialist political leader. Boyle is just avoiding the political issues, like the local worthies in the leadership of the Socialist Alliance in WA avoided them before him. When are we going to get a serious debate about the questions arising from the false, anti-socialist positions presented at the Fremantle forum on 'porn' last year? Or do the ex-DSP elements who run the Socialist Alliance in this country wish to continue to be regarded by the rest of the left here as a laughing stock and as a bunch of reactionary wowsers?
- Graham Milner
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Facebook correspondence between Graham Milner and Peter Boyle
from Graham Milner to Peter Boyle
Dear Peter,
Thank you for your comments in reply to my query concerning SA policy on pornography at last weekend's Socialist Alliance educational conference in Perth. I have just found an item on the web that is very interesting and instructive about what presumably was DSP policy on the question in the mid-1990s. It is a paper presented by Resistance/DSP member Emma Webb to a NOWSA conference.
I don't think I have the computer skills to send the document through to your Facebook address. If I could 'Friend' you I might be able to do it. I'll send a 'Friend Request'. I've sent copies of Webb's paper to Alex Bainbridge and other Facebook friends.
I do take the point that you raised at the conference concerning children and pornography seriously. I don't have any children myself I know, but I wonder sometimes how parents can manage to screen their kids from some of the disturbing images online. I can only speculate, but I would think that with the advent of the 'smart phone', which has access to the internet, it would not be easy to impose 'net nannies' on such devices. I should imagine that only one such device with unrestricted access to the internet, among children in a school playground, would make everything known to them. A friend of mine who works as a school psychologist/guidance counsellor in Perth maintains that the vast majority of parents in her jurisdiction exercise virtually no control over their children's access to and usage of the internet while at home.
So my general point made at last Saturday's conference stands. Emma Webb's NOWSA DSP/Resistance paper has a standpoint that is quite different from the viewpoint presented at the Fremantle Socialist Alliance forum on 'Raunch Culture, Porn and Women's Liberation' by the two speakers on the platform, who put forward a radical-feminist position and not a socialist one. I noticed at the time of the Fremantle forum last year that a forum with a similar title was held in at least one other Australian city - Brisbane. I am not aware if the perspective presented at the Brisbane forum was similar to Fremantle's
Best wishes to you, Pip and Zoe
from Graham Milner
from Graham Milner to Peter Boyle
Well then, Peterkins: are you intending to ignore my correspondence indefinitely? One of your predecessors in the leadership of the Percy movement, James Percy himself in fact, also ignored my correspondence. Hardly a surprise, really. We are of course all well aware of the vast gulf that separates ordinary members of the community like myself from the exalted, Olympian heights occupied by the senior hierarchy of the Socialist Alliance.
Don't you think it unreasonable and entirely inappropriate that someone should be expelled from the Socialist Alliance for attempting to defend party policy? That is what happened to me. The views I expressed on Perth Indymedia (and which will be reposted there shortly) about the Fremantle forum on 'Raunch Culture, Porn [sic] and Women's Liberation' held last year were essentially the same as those contained in DSPer Emma Webb's paper presented to a NOWSA conference in the mid-1990s; a paper I mentioned in my last message to you.
So what are you going to do about this situation, Peterkins? Bainbridge, the local DSP/SA proconsul, maintained that he 'couldn't remember', in his answer to a query from me as to whether he had discussed with you before it occurred (while you were over here for the Occupy Perth events last year) the question of my expulsion from SA. Do you remember, or are you a sufferer from selective amnesia as well?
Are you intending to persevere along the well-trodden path of Percyism, with its total contempt for the democratic rights of the party membership, or are you capable of raising yourself above the level of the spineless, gutless Percyite arseholes who have infested the leadership of the Deadly Serious Party and its predecessors since the mid-1960s?
from Peter Boyle to Graham Milner
Sorry Graham you are just not well enough. Take care.
from Graham Milner to Peter Boyle
I know that you never completed your law degree at the University of WA Peter, but I wasn't aware until now that you had acquired, since the 1970s when I met you, qualifications in medicine. You should examine my posts onto the Perth Indymedia site under the title; 'DSP caucus expels dissident WA Socialist Alliance member' for an account of the systematic discrimination I endured at the hands of the DSP leadership of the WA Socialist Alliance during my eight years of membership of that organisation, and also of the earlier experience I had of similar discrimination during the period of contact I had with the Percy movement between 1980 and the early 1990s.