Foxtel’s bestiality billboard is last straw: industry must be regulated

Princeton ethicist Peter Singer, recently awarded our nation’s highest honour, thinks bestiality is fine.

Perhaps that is why Foxtel knew it could get away with purchasing a billboard in Kings Cross featuring a man simulating sex with a pig.

If ethics is so confused that its teachers have no moral compass, why should we be surprised a large company seeks to cash in on the controversy it knows it will generate by advertising in this manner?

There was no ethical consideration by Foxtel of the mental health effects on children of being exposed to something like this, let alone that of adults.

But because outdoor advertising in Australia is self-regulated, Dracula is in charge of the blood bank and Foxtel knew it could pull this outrageous stunt without penalty.

Foxtel’s promise to remove its bestiality billboard – just hours after ACL’s Wendy Francis was interviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald online - is too little too late and highlights the on-going appalling failure of self-regulation.

It is high time all governments around Australia acted to clean up this industry and imposed heavy penalties for breaches.

For years outdoor advertisers have flouted community standards and shown contempt to parents and the innocence of childhood with ever more sexualised content.

There have been multiple parliamentary inquiries into this and other issues affecting the sexualisation of children in the contemporary media but no action taken.

The exception is in Queensland where the Attorney General Jarrod Bleijie has committed the government to acting after yet another review.

The Queensland Parliamentary Inquiry shouldn’t need too much more persuading after this latest outrage.

It is time for all governments around Australia to act and for the nonsense of industry self-regulation to end.

Despite admitting its billboard was a “lapse of judgement”, Foxtel is being helped to cash in on the controversy by Fairfax Media.

Fairfax Media should immediately stop running advertising for Studio 132 and Foxtel alongside its online articles which detail the public outrage at Foxtel.

It is bad enough that Foxtel almost certainly purchased this billboard with the full intention of getting free publicity out of the inevitable controversy, but now Fairfax Media is complicit by running advertisements for the very program alongside articles criticising it.

There seems to be no limit to the ends to which our media is prepared to debase itself in the pursuit of profit.

If Fairfax Media is at all serious about its article’s criticisms of Foxtel, it should not be lamely complicit in providing the advertising they always sought.

Where is the Advertising Standards Board in the midst of all this? Asleep at the wheel seems to be the answer.

Australians have to decide whether or not we wish to live in a civil society. It is time we pushed back on the incursion into our lives of outrageous and damaging imagery peddled by the pornography industry and now mainstreamed by the advertising industry.

The mark of a civil society is how it cares for its young.

Foxtel’s reckless action in exposing children to a bestiality image can only be described as a form of child abuse.

That they will get away with it is a scandal for which politicians who have ignored calls to regulate outdoor advertising should be ashamed.

I hope Peter Singer would be just as appalled as we are at Foxtel’s exposing children to this image. However, when we honour people like Singer without qualification, we have to realise that their ideas have consequences.

Foxtel’s appalling action is a logical outworking of the mainstreaming of bestiality by people like Singer.

Groups like ACL are often criticised for warning about the slippery slope but Foxtel has given us and our children a glimpse of where Singer’s slope might take us.