Kiwiblog

Ian Steward at The Press reports:

An influx of earthquake relief workers has made Christchurch’s disaster a bonanza for the city’s prostitutes.

Manchester St sex worker Candice, 24, said she has been run off her feet servicing search and rescue staff, builders, and even two New South Wales police officers.

“They took pictures with me to show the boys back home. They were in uniform but they took off their orange singlets because they said it ruined the picture.”

Normally I’d be suspicious of claims of Police frequeting prostitutes, but as they are NSW Police I really wouldn’t rule it out!

Candice said she had made an average of $700 a night since returning two nights after the February 22 quake.

On her best night she had made $1400, charging $100 for sex or $120 for 30 minutes of “everything”.

$700 a night is pretty decent money if she is on the street as that probably indicates she keeps what she earns. If she works six nights a week that is $4,200 a week or $200,000 a year.

This week the House voted to send the Manukau City Council (Regulation of Prostitution in Specified Places) Bill to select committee by 82-36. The bill’s purpose is:

This Bill provides for local bylaw control over the locations where the business of prostitution or commercial sexual services may occur when that business or those services take place or are conducted other than in a brothel or a small owner-operated brothel in Manukau City.

Ironic the bill has its first reading a few weeks before the Council disappears. I guess it can be amended to the Auckland Council, but am not sure the Auckland Council wants the power.

I was an active support of Tim Barnett’s bill to legalise prostitution (or more correctly solicitation). But I do appreciate Manukau does have some specific problems, and generally favouring the subsidiarity principle.

If I was an MP, I probably would have voted Yes at first reading – mainly to allow select committee submissions.

The Clerk’s Office has kindly supplied the breakdown of how the MPs voted. A summary by party is:

• National 58-0 in favour
• Labour 17-25 (C Carter not vote)
• Greens 2-6 (Norman not vote)
• Maori 0-5
• ACT 5-0
• Dunne and Anderton did not vote

It was meant to be a conscience vote, but I wonder if National were whipped to vote yes? I’m very suspicious that not a single MP voted against. Maybe, like me, they all thought it deserves select committee hearings.

The bill was put forward by Labour MP George Hawkins, but most of his colleagues voted against it.

Somewhat surprisingly all of ACT voted for it, and all of Maori voted against it.

The HoS reports:

The prostitute given $2.4 million by fraudulent banker Stephen Versalko is far from the high end of the escort business.

Instead, she is a mother of one who worked at an Auckland brothel, the Pelican Club, and is closer in age to Versalko’s 49-year-old wife Megan than the many of the other prostitutes that she used to work with.

The prostitute’s daughter, like Versalko’s only girl, is a teenager.

While the Pelican Club charges its staff out at $210 an hour – although clients can pay up to $1500 a night – the women earn considerably less. By comparison, celebrity stripper and escort Lisa Lewis once advertised her services at $7000 a night.

The ASB Bank is now suing the prostitute for the $2.4m Versalko paid her.

Now this could be a very interesting court case.

Presumably any money paid to the escort, for actual services, she should be able to keep. Just the same as any money he paid to a doctor, or if he had gambled it at Sky City.

But it seems apparent that Versalko paid the escort a lot more than he had to commercially – ie he gifted money to her – possibly through coercion.

So if it goes to court, the court may have to decide what is the appropriate rate of return for prostitution, so it can work out how much on top of that was a gift.

I predict a well attended court for a commercial case!

The Herald looks at the case of fraudster Stephen Versalko:

If it wasn’t for Bernie Madoff, Stephen Versalko could still be stealing millions.

The largest employee theft in New Zealand history was discovered only after an ASB Bank client saw a television show about Madoff, America’s US$50 billion fraudster.

In August, a woman who had invested more than $3 million with ASB adviser Versalko became uneasy about the fact he was the only staff member she had dealt with.

If something happened to her, she reasoned, 52-year-old Versalko would be the only person who knew anything about the funds into which her money had gone.

At about the same time, she watched a documentary about Ponzi fraudster Madoff that rang alarm bells. Madoff’s technique of fobbing off his victims reminded her of Versalko.

A phone call to ASB confirmed the investor’s worst fears – her multimillion-dollar investment portfolio was fictitious.

Madoff finally does some good.

Then a Serious Fraud Office inquiry found nearly 30 wealthy clients had been defrauded of nearly $18 million over nine years.

Criminal charges were laid in the week before Christmas, and Versalko pleaded guilty in February.

Yesterday, he was sentenced in the Auckland District Court to six years in prison, with a minimum-non parole period of four years.

I don’t think that is enough, for the scale of his offending. He had ten years of the good life living off his victim’s money.

But one of the more sordid details of the case is that Versalko paid $3.4 million to two prostitutes with whom he had long-term arrangements.

Good God. That is a lot of money for sex!

If one assumes the cost of a normal sexual encounter is $200, then that is 17,000 bonks. Now over 10 years that is 1,700 bonks a year or around five bonks a day.

Now there were two of them, so he may have had threesomes, but that would still be two threesomes a day with change left over.

The Herald understands Versalko took one of the women – instead of his wife – on a business trip to Dubai to stay in the Burj Al Arab Hotel, where the cheapest room costs US$2000 a night.

He was married? Oh yuck. Poor woman.

The Dom Post reports:

Twenty-five years after New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policy was debated at the prestigious Oxford Union, our prostitution laws are taking centre stage.

The Prostitutes Collective national co-ordinator, Catherine Healy, will enter the debating chamber in England next week, to argue that prostitution should be legalised.

Squaring off against her will be a top British policeman and a conservative American lobby group.

Incidentally, prostitution was legal in New Zealand before the Prostitution Law Reform Act was passed a few years ago. It was solicitation, not prostitution, that was illegal.

Prostitution is fully legal in only around two dozen countries – Austria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, Lebanon, much of South America, and the eastern states of Australia.

One of my holiday reads is Superfreakonomics – the sequel to the best selling Freakonomics. Freakonomics was not just a fun read, but a wonderful demonstration that “people respond to incentives” –albeit often in unpredictable ways.

In the original, they reported one study of an LA crack dealing gang, and the economics of it. In this book, they look at Chicago prostitution, along with many other issues such as altruism, monkeys, global warming, drunk walking and tracking terrorists.

If I have time, I may do potted summaries of several of the chapters, and we’ll start with the prostitution one.

• Business model is simple – since time immemorial men have wanted more sex than they can get for free, so inevitably this has led to a women supplying sex for a price to satisfy demand
• In 1910s, one in 50 American women in their 20s were estimated to be “in the army of vice”
• In Chicago 100 years ago a typical prostitute earned around 11 times the average wage for a woman
• As prostitution was illegal and a social stigma, this reduced supply, pushing prices up
• A recent two year study in Chicago of 160 prostitutes found an average week consists of 10 “sex acts” bringing in $350 a week. At $27 an hour this is around four times greater than secondary jobs held by the prostitutes
• Why has the wage premium fallen so much in 100 years? Competition! From women who have sex with men for free. Yes friends with benefits/casual sex has lowered the average earnings from prostitution!
• The average price in Chicago is $27 for “manual stimulation, $37 for oral sex, $80 for vaginal sex and $94 for anal sex. 100 years ago oral sex would cost to to three times vaginal sex. Why did it use to cost more? It was seen as taboo.
• The market share in Chiacgo is 55% oral, 17% vaginal, 15% manual, 9% anal and 4% other.
• Prostitutes practice price discrimination and on average charge a black customer $9 less than a white customer. Price discrimination only works when one can not resell and benefit from arbitrage. Condition satisfied!
• With black customers prostitutes normally name the price outright. With white customers they will often ask the customer to name a price.
• At a set location, the price rarely varies per prostitute, despite variations in attractiveness. Conclusion is customers see prostitutes as commodities like bananas – easily interchangeable.
• They discovered that pimps actually increase income for a prostitute – on average from $325 to $410 a week. They generate more “tricks”. They compared the value prostitutes get from pimps to the value house sellers get from realtors and conclude you get far better value from a pimp
• The average prostitute will turn 450 tricks before being arrested, while 3% of tricks performed are freebies for police officers so a prostitute is 13 times more likely to sleep with a police officer than be arrested by one!
• Prostitutes react to demand. At holiday weekends prices go up around 30%, and they do many hours of overtime. Also many ex-prostitutes return to the game just for big holiday weekends – a bit like a department store Santa

The next chapter I’ll cover is the tracking terrorists. One major London bank tried to profile likely terrorists based on the banking records fo those known to be terrorists. One of the indicators they found was that suicide bombers never have life insurance!

Belle de Jour is the pen name of the blogger who wrote Diary of a London Call Girl. A TV series, based on her diaries, starred Billie Piper.

Bele has outed herself to The Times. Her real name is Brooke Magnanti, and her background is not what most would expect for a hooker – even a high class one.

Brooke, or Dr Magnanti, specialises in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology. She has a PhD in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science and is part of a team researching the effects of exposure to the pesticide chlorpyrifos on foetuses and infants.

She took up prostitution, charging 300 pounds an hour, to help keep her out of debt, when she was studying for her PhD.

The Herald on Sunday reveals that National List MP Kanwal Bakshi owns a brothel. Well, not the business – just the house it operated from.

Now to be fair to Bakshi, he knew nothing about the use his property was being out to, until he received complaints, and he did then evict them within three weeks.

Still, might be a wake up call to MPs who are landlords – pay the odd surprise visit!

A blog that has absolutely no conection to the Labour Party has revealed John Key’s role in the prostitution industry and how he plans to become NZ’s biggest pimp. Their story (now deleted) is:

This week Slippery John Key announced that if he deludes enough people into voting for him, he will appoint himself Minister of Tourism.

This appears on the surface to be innocent, but documents obtained by the Sydney Morning Herald quote Prince Philip (married to NZ’s Head of State) as saying:

“tourism is just national prostitution”

This means that Slippery John wants to become Slippery Minister of Tourism so that he can control New Zealand’s prostitution industry. Slippery John (have we mentioned how slippery he is) wants to be New Zealand’s biggest pimp.

This blog would like to reassure readers that if this story doesn’t hold up, it is not being handled by the Prime Minister at all.

That John Key – both NZ’s biggest ever fraud mastermind and NZ’s biggest pimp. When does he get the time to sleep?

Family First has rated every party leader for their “family friendliness” as they see it. This is a great idea, as those who agree with Family First’s values can use it as a positive guide, and those who disagree can use it as a negative guide. More lobby groups should do this sort of stuff.

The overall ratings (in order) for each Leader is:

1. Winston Peters 77%
2. Peter Dunne 69%
3. Pita Sharples 57%
4. Tariana Turia 54%
5. John Key 54%
6. Jim Anderton 38%
7. Rodney Hide 31%
8. Jeanette Fitzsimons 15%
9. Helen Clark 8%

Winston is the poster boy for social conservatism which is why it is so hilarious that so many on the left are doing everything possible to defend him.

There were 13 issues or votes they judged the Leaders on. I list them below, along with how I would have voted on it if I was an MP.

1. Prostitution Bill- DPF support – 0
2. Civil Unions – DPF support – 0
3. Relationships Bill – DPF support – 0
4. Parental Notification for under 16 abortions – DPF support – 1 (I support notification, not approval)
5. Euthanasia – DPF support – 0
6. Care of Children – DPF oppose – 1
7. Marriage Amendment (define as man/woman only) – DPF oppose – 0
8. Anti-Smacking – DPF oppose – 1
9. Easter Trading – DPF support – 0
10. Easter Sunday Trading – DPF support – 0
11. Drinking Age to 20 – DPF oppose – 0
12. Street Prostitution (Manukau) – DPF oppose – 0
13. Electoral Finance – DPF oppose – 1

So if I was a party leader I would be scored 4/13 or 31% – the same as Rodney Hide.

I was a supporter of Tim Barnett’s Prostitution Law Reform Act. In fact for many years I regaled Young Nationals conferences about the unfairness of a law which made it an offence for someone to offer sex for money, but not for someone to offer money for sex. I instinctively dislike most laws which criminalise consensual behaviour.

A report on the law by the Prostitution Law Review Committee has found that the number of prostitutes has stayed around the same, since the law was passed, but that there is less exploitation and better health and safety. So that is good.

One of the issues around the law change, has been the extent to which Councils can restrict the location of brothels. There has been a lot of publicity around a brothel in Mt Victoria, and Rosemary McLeod has a local’s perspective on it.

In terms of public policy, I don’t have a problem with commercial sex being provided from private homes, as that generally is a less exploitive and safer arrangement, but it should be only one or two people.

The Mt Victoria house is seeking or has been given permission to have seven staff working there. Now when it gets that large, I am very much siding with the residents – the impact on the neighbourhood gets to be significant. So one solution might be to limit the size of any suburban brothels so their impact on a neighbourhood is minimised.

New York Governor Eliot Splitzer, has been named in a federal prosecution of a prostitution ring.

Now personally I don’t think the fact he paid up to $5,500 a time to bonk some high class hooker means he is unfit for office. But because he has prosecuted prostitution rings in the past and campaigned on ethics, the hypocrisy is notable.

Most pundits are picking he will resign. Time will tell.