Fiona Patten likens the sex industry to the caged canary that miners in a less scientific age took underground with them not because they wanted to hear it sing but because if the canary died they knew the air was bad and that it was time to get out.

Censorship of sexual material is in due course followed by more general political censorship. The censorship tide ebbs and flows. In Australia today, where the Rudd Government is proposing legislation to censor the internet through compulsory filtering, it is flowing.

And Patten, the chief executive officer of the Eros Association, is doing something about it. She is launching the Australian Sex Party, with a 16-point program incorporating proposals that she has been seeking, unsuccessfully for years.

The party believes in a national classification scheme for X-rated films and a law against discrimination on the basis of job occupation, profession or calling. It says there should be mandatory equal numbers of men and women in the Senate and state upper houses. Pregnancy laws should be on the same basis as divorce laws, providing for legal, no-fault and guilt-free processes for women seeking termination. It believes Viagra and Cialis and any other drug used to treat sexual dysfunction should be added to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. It would overturn the decision to cease contributing Australian aid to international organisations providing family planning services.

It seeks the repeal of Northern Territory laws making it illegal for Aborigines to possess X-rated films, and also proposes non-discriminatory immigration so that sex workers could enter Australia on working visas instead of being lured in and kept as sex slaves without recourse to Australian law. The party also wants paid maternity leave, legal same-sex marriages, equal rights under the law for gays, lesbians and same-sex couples, a royal commission into child sex abuse in religious institutions and would seek to end the tax-exempt status for religions.

Minor parties get elected to the Senate on the flow-on of votes from the Labor, Liberal and National parties, because Labor and the Coalition are in agreement that their mutual antipathy over-rides all issues of policy and principle.

So the Australian Sex Party is asking voters to give it their first preference for the Senate and to vote the ticket of its preferred party in the House. The quota of votes needed to get a senator elected is about 34,000 in the ACT, 37,000 in Tasmania, 600,000 in NSW and 460,000 in Victoria.

It looks like a big ask, but Barack Obama has just demonstrated how far you can go with the internet. There are about 1000 shops selling sex toys and videos in Australia which will function as party branches, and if those four million customers for X-rated DVDs decide they do not wish to be branded as dishonourable and disgusting by a government they have elected and give their first preferences to the Australian Sex Party, the result could be surprising.

In the Senate now, Labor has 32 senators, the Coalition 37, the Greens five and there are two independents.

Where the Greens purport to be tree-huggers, but in reality have a wide-ranging left-wing agenda, the Australian Sex Party is narrowly focused on sex and censorship and open government. It would be painless for either Coalition or Labor voters should they agree with their goals to give them a first preference, and then move to the ticket of a major party.

The Australian Sex Party seeks sufficient numbers in the Senate to enable it to reverse the tide of censorship which began with Paul Keating and with Tasmanian senator Brian Harradine.

The canary argument is colourful, but it has force. Successively, governments have ceased to distribute the Gazette to the Press Gallery, and the daily Hansard proofs.

The last budget was notable in the reduction in the amount of factual information. The government has now begun to announce reports without actually distributing them, as with the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, a very important document. The tendency to close up on information is becoming stronger.

Censorship, argues the Australian Sex Party, starts with telling people they can't look at girls' bottoms, which is an insult to girls, and ends by withholding strategic economic information, which endangers people's jobs.

David Barnett is a Canberra writer.