Andrew Rule: How dodgy Melbourne sex workers are flouting coronavirus measures
Social distancing and casual sex with strangers don’t mix. But seedy sex dens flouting the coronavirus restrictions are popping up all over Melbourne and putting us all at risk, writes Andrew Rule.
Andrew Rule
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A few days ago, a man identifying himself by his first name buzzed the intercom of a tall apartment building opposite Southern Cross station. He spoke briefly to the young woman who answered, then the door clicked open and he took the lift to an apartment high above deserted city streets.
There he produced cash, as agreed in advance. The “contract” was a text on his phone seen by the Sunday Herald Sun: a blunt summary of the sex acts that $250 buys, sent after he responded to one of a smorgasbord of advertisements available on various online sites.
An hour later he was back on the street. An hour after that, another man had taken his place, and so on all day and the next in the shady world of pop-up brothels.
All this despite the fact the coronavirus pandemic is sweeping Australia and the world.
The same thing happened the previous week and will most likely happen today and again tomorrow: if not at this particular Spencer St building then at other short-stay city apartments whose owners (perhaps unknowingly) profit from an unregulated sex racket that is playing Russian roulette with coronavirus — and all our lives.
Social distance and casual sex with strangers don’t mix. But the Airbnb version of the oldest profession has hardly missed a beat, judging from “personal” advertisements that hook clients for transient escorts whose main concession to the health crisis is that they now can’t hop from city to city to do business.
That means most of them will have to prop and set up “shop” in the city in which they officially live or are enrolled as students.
In the case cited above, the escort was a South-East Asian technically based in Sydney with a student visa to enable her to learn English there two days a week, a part-time “diploma” course effectively used as cover for full-time prostitution.
The man telling his part in the story is doing so because he believes the illegal sex “industry” is a blind spot that authorities are overlooking in the battle to beat coronavirus.
Tommy Dogget is not his real name but it’s near enough. He is an executive but wary of revealing his profession.
Before the coronavirus hit, he often travelled interstate. He is a single consenting adult with single adult tastes, which is why he has become familiar with the semi-illegal world of escorts in recent years.
Until this month, Tommy took the view the secretive but hardly secret sex-for-sale business didn’t bother most people and hurt no one.
He could even rationalise that his money helped the families of those he paid for their services.
He has got to know one Asian escort, who has given him an insight into a world of manipulative immigration agents, cynical police and apathetic authorities — and has revealed her own nakedly materialistic motives for coming to Australia as a professional sex worker posing as a student, the same charade acted out by thousands of visitors in the “gig” economy.
When the coronavirus crisis reached Australia, Dogget changed his mind about the escort racket because it now potentially threatens the lives of family and friends. He believes government agencies and police virtually ignore a largely ungoverned sex industry that jeopardises Australians.
Both sides of the escort business — clients and workers — by definition attract people who bend or break the rules of conventional behaviour, if not the law.
So it’s disturbing but hardly surprising that online “personal” advertisements show that escorts are still working their usual “beats”, renting city apartments in Melbourne and other cities to service clients drawn by online ads.
“It’s business as usual,” Dogget told the Sunday Herald Sun midweek as mainstream Australia faced the latest round of unavoidably tough restrictions aimed at curbing the pandemic.
Escorts are the cash cows in a business brazenly breaching the regulations about cutting down social contact. Most advertising and short-stay accommodation is handled by organisers who skim cash from each sex worker.
Even before the coronavirus crisis caught his attention, Dogget noticed that the rules didn’t seem to apply to escorts who advertise online to recruit clients, get paid in cash and (until recently) rotated between cities.
For a start, in his experience, most of the sex workers in the escort racket are long-term stayers (mostly from Thailand) who openly abuse the terms of their student visas, enrolled in “mickey mouse” courses that appear to provide cover for less innocent activities.
The “students” sell sex for cash, routinely banking up to $1000 a day to avoid being robbed by violent clients, yet do not attract the attention of the Australian Taxation Office or other authorities despite obviously earning far more than they should under legitimate employment under the terms of student visas.
“I know of some people who fly back home three or four times a year,” Dogget says. It seems clear these people work illegally, pay no tax and routinely send large sums of money out of Australia.
Breaking Australian laws to set up instant brothels in high-rise apartment blocks and dodging tax is one thing; ignoring the danger of coronavirus is quite another. Whereas the first is about residential amenity and taxation, the second is about life and death.
This is similar to (and most likely linked with) the notorious Thai massage shopfronts that infest every other shopping strip in Australia. Both versions of thinly veiled prostitution seem to operate beneath the radar of law enforcement.
The parlours and the pop-up brothels are hidden in plain sight and so are the police who are supposed to prosecute them, without fear or favour. Perhaps that will change if Daniel Andrews, emerging as the nation’s tough-guy premier, takes aim at those who breach the coronavirus regulations.
Even dark clouds can have silver linings. One thing the stay-home rule should ensure is that burglaries, car crashes and driving offences drop further and faster than family violence goes up.
That means there should be plenty of police to help the 500 officers the Premier has already earmarked to enforce the coronavirus restrictions.
Then, of course, there is Border Force and the NSW Health Department, smarting from their Dumb and Dumber debacle, in which 2700 passengers were allowed to leave a cruise ship, carrying coronavirus cases into Sydney. These are the same people not bothering to check air passengers entering Australia until it was far too late.
It would be funny if it wasn’t tragic. Given the terrifying arithmetic that each infected person infects at least two others, creating an exponential explosion, it is clear that public servants asleep at the wheel have caused hundreds of people to be infected. Of those, some have already died. And more will.
If state and federal police, Border Force and various health departments cannot control stupid but largely law-abiding tourists, what hope have they got of handling sex, lies and coronavirus on the shady side of the street?
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