There are thousands of knock shops honeycombing the city and suburbs and most of them are run by women operating alone or with a few colleagues from a flat or house.

Erica Red, from the Scarlet Alliance (sic) and a founding member of the Private Worker Alliance, estimates that in NSW there are 4000 women working as micro-businesses in this way - that is about 50 per cent of all the sex services supplied in the state. This is an enormous business.

I'm not talking about the traditional trade, where married women provide sexual services to their husbands in exchange for domestic harmony and possibly a small bibelot.

The paid-by-the-hour professional woman is the focus of attention here. Apart from its important revenue contribution to journalism and the print medium - and heaven knows we need all the support we can get at the moment - the sex industry fulfils other important social functions. It minimises men's harassment of women at work and home and generally calms an unpredictable element of the populace.

Those who object to the trade on moral grounds are being a tiny bit hypocritical since the benefits of the professional sex business over the centuries have been shown to far outweigh the detriments.

It was no accident that 50 years ago a brothel operated on the top floor of Selborne Chambers, one of the leading barristers' chambers in the city. The tonic-like qualities this had, directly, for members of the bar and judges and, indirectly, for clients and parties to litigation and the whole justice system would be quite incalculable.

The important thing is that those plying the trade run their operations in a healthy manner, and as free from criminals and standover types as possible.

That is why the 1995 NSW Disorderly Houses (Amendment) Act was such a groundbreaking piece of law. It decriminalised the provision of sex outside one's own home, for money. The Restricted Premises Act says a place should not be declared a "disorderly house" solely because it is a brothel.

The details of how that should work in practice were to be the responsibility of local councils. And that's where the rot set in.

In 1996, a committee of eight senior state bureaucrats constructed a set of guidelines as the basis for local government regulation of private workers and commercial brothels.

Those guidelines were subsequently ditched and, in 2000, a ministerial taskforce on brothels got to work. It fiddled around for two years and then decided that a different body was needed to draw up new guidelines.

That's when the Sex Services Premises Planning Advisory Panel was created and finally, by the end of 2004, it came up with 200 pages of what's what in the business of sex.

You can see that this was not a wham-bam sort of process. Slow and gentle has been the pace here. The Government sat on the recommended guidelines for a further 15 months and has only just released them.

Not even those on the panel were allowed to have copies and freedom of information applications were rejected on the basis that releasing them would "be contrary to the public interest".

How wrong can you be? The guidelines deal with how the sex game would operate throughout the state. What could be more interesting than that?

In the meantime, there's been an immense upheaval in the whole planning landscape, as Elizabeth Farrelly pointed out on this page on Wednesday. A bill is before Parliament to transfer more planning authority and power away from councils and to the minister, Frank Sartor.

The local-standard environment plan proposed by the Department of Planning cuts across the intent of the legislation that decriminalised the workers in 1995. The plan allows councils to prohibit home-occupation sex work and allows the work to be distinguished, for planning purposes, from other home-based occupations.

Development applications will have to be sought from councils if a woman wants to sell sex from home. This immediately obliterates the veil of discretion and anonymity that is the cornerstone of the caper.

So now we've pretty well come full circle. From a decriminalised workplace, it's back to one where, unless development applications have been obtained, these small businesswomen will have to work outside the law.

Of course, the big brothel owners have the game sown up. They can fight the local councils in the Land and Environment Court and usually win. This is why large commercial brothels now dominate the sex trade in the regional areas of NSW.

And they'll just keep getting bigger. After all, if a large brothel keeper hears of a couple of women working from home anywhere near his turf, one phone call to the council will have them run out of town. It's ready made for standover men.

How's that for competition? It's about time our small-businessman Prime Minister stood up for independent sex workers. After all, many of their clients would be Liberal voters.

justinian@lawpress.com.au