Page 723 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 5 April 2022
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Mr Steel: Brendan Smyth.
MR PARTON: We blame Brendan Smyth for a lot of things! No, we don’t. I gather it was his amendment. I will have to ask him what is going on there. I think we can all agree that changing the penalties so that they are consistent and in line just makes sense.
This offence is also not one that seeks to punish those who might take an e-scooter home on a night out, when nested with the power for police to direct someone to not get on an e-scooter in the previous bill. When you marry those up, this offence will mean that, prior to a charge, the chances are that if indeed you were staggering out of a nightclub you would have been told not to get on the scooter. After that, the threshold for impairment is to the point of being incapable of having proper control of the vehicle, which is quite a high threshold. When considered together, I think it is clear that this is about making sure that people stay safe.
It also reflects the changing ways in which we are travelling around our city. The changes to ensure that parking a non-electric vehicle in an EV charging space is an infringement, again, just make sense. This will become more and more important as we see EVs adopting a larger role on our roads. If we want to ensure that electric vehicles become a more attractive and viable option for Canberrans—and, again, that is something that we all agree on in this place—we must ensure that they are able to be charged in an efficient manner. This change will help to ensure this.
As I raised in the previous debate as well, these bills present all of us in this chamber with a great opportunity and an even larger responsibility to play a part in educating the community about road safety measures. I am sure that the minister and the directorate have things in the pipeline, but I think it is imperative that, following the passage of this bill, we ensure that the changes are appropriately and effectively communicated with the Canberra community. There is no point in making a change to keep people safe if we do not tell them that we have made the change. That is all I have to say about this bill. I will leave it to the minister.
MS CLAY (Ginninderra) (11.23): The Greens are also really happy to support this bill and the amendments it makes. I want to take a few minutes to talk about the amendment around parking in an EV charging spot. I was really pleased to hear Mr Parton’s words about that, too.
We all know that we are in a climate emergency; we need to tackle it as fast as we can and we are doing a really good job here in the ACT. We have named the problem, we have switched to 100 per cent renewable electricity and we have a policy in place to electrify everything. But we know that our transport emissions are around 60 per cent of our tracked emissions, and we know that we need to move faster on getting closer to zero emissions travel options. We need to make it practical and convenient for all Canberrans.
The really good news is that we are at a point in the world where most of our solutions are already here. Last week I rode in an electric freight truck. That truck had
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