Page 735 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 5 July 1989
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
We have had, Mr Speaker, any amount of anecdotal information concerning street crimes and also a large debate on the kinds of crimes that people consider would justify bringing in move-on powers for the police. It is my belief, as I think I have made clear over the last few weeks, that there may be problems of social behaviour in the streets which are giving cause for some anxiety by the community, and that we need to address those issues, perhaps not in the rather draconian way of introducing legislation that has already been acknowledged as needing a great deal of work, but rather by looking at the underlying issues and trying to find the causes of these apparent behavioural difficulties, looking at the problems to which they are giving rise and ways in which those problems might be addressed at their roots rather than at their end result, as it is my understanding the move-on powers tend to do.
I will not address the matter at any greater length, Mr Speaker, because I am not terribly sure it is the attitude of the rest of the Assembly on it. I might leave other members to make those points on their own.
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (4.28): Mr Speaker, I was interested that the Chief Minister expressed some question in her mind about whether she should have left this motion on the business paper. I have to say that personally I have real reservations about it. It stems from the kind of argument that has been advanced before. We have been over the ground a little already. First of all, there is the proposition that our committees are being already overloaded, if you take them collectively, and that the individual members of the committees, rather than the committees themselves, are finding themselves a little stretched to cover the activities of all the committees and deal, in the time scales that are being set, with all of the references.
I am quite sure that the secretariat must be feeling the stress of providing the secretarial support for all of these committees to perform all of the studies that are being referred to them in the time scales that are being set. My reservations about this kind of study - and I have expressed them before - are in connection with the Government and the Ministers referring matters like this to the standing committees of the Assembly.
As I have said before, unlike members of the Government - the Ministers particularly - the rest of us have no resources to undertake significant and major studies. The only way that we can get anything on the agenda and have it examined is to refer it to an Assembly committee. On the other hand, the four members of the Cabinet have entire departments behind them. If a matter falls within the ambit of responsibility of the portfolio of a Minister, it is simple, as the Minister for Housing and Urban Services has already done, to institute an inquiry to be carried out by his or her staff. It takes the pressure off the
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .