Sex Party President Fiona Patten said that the party is running Andrew Patterson, a 46-year-old former vice squad detective sergeant and chief investigator for the Independent Commission Against Corruption in the seat of Sydney.
In the Upper House, the party is running Huw Campbell, a 23-year-old student from Sydney University.
Patten said that both candidates would run as Independents as the Sex Party had been told by the NSW Electoral Commission some 15 months ago that it was too late to register for the current election.
“The NSW government, the Opposition and the Greens have made it so difficult, expensive and time-consuming to register a new party in NSW that very few new parties will be seen in state elections for the next few decades,” Patten said.
She added, “But by endorsing and backing independent candidates and creating new social networking tools to do this, the major parties may have shot themselves in the foot.”
The Sex Party president noted that Patterson will run on a civil liberties, drug law reform, anti -corruption and anti-censorship platform, which would be unique in this election.
“My background as a police officer and an ICAC investigator has shown me how governments feed black markets and organized crime through irresponsible social policies,” Patterson said.
“The pressure must be enormous and the issues would often be conflicting, I would imagine. If elected I would seek to introduce legislation to make people choose one or the other. With the issues currently facing the City of Sydney I believe the people of Sydney deserve a full time MP and a full time Lord Mayor."
The former law enforcement officer added that the seat of Sydney also includes Kings Cross — the symbolic center of sex, drugs and organized crime in Australia and that if elected, he would introduce into Parliament new ways of dealing with these problems that were currently being tested in modern European democracies.
“The old style approach to drugs, censorship and corruption has not worked. There are new ways of dealing with these issues that require completely new political approaches, which we will not get from dinosaurs like Fred Nile, David Clark and John Hatzistagos,” Patterson said.
