Page 2066 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 5 June 1990
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whole structure of legislation in our country is that movable feasts are prescribed rather than inscribed. The fact is that our industrial suburbs may change over time; they may become residential suburbs; things may happen. It is an accepted drafting style and practice to prescribe issues of detail by regulation.
Mr Speaker, I table now the draft regulations which I propose to introduce perhaps tomorrow or as soon as the printing can be done after this Bill is passed. I table those draft regulations for the information of members and as a sign of the Government's good faith in that regard. No doubt we will be held to those by the industry.
Ms Follett also asked why we knocked out Mr Moore's Bill when it largely reflected some of the principal provisions of this amendment now before the house. The straightforward answer to that is that Mr Moore's Bill preceded the banning debate, and those who know the structure of the views in the Alliance will realise that it was clearly not appropriate for us to support Mr Moore's Bill in advance of the Liberal Party and others in our Alliance wanting to press their point of view in the free conscience debate in that regard.
The problem with Mr Moore's Bill was less substance and more sequence. Of course, our Bill is modelled to some extent on Mr Moore's Bill. I do join with him in the comments that he made in the first debate when he said, "Let us not by hypocritical on this issue". I endorse Mr Moore's approach on the issue. His Bill was out of sequence as far as the Alliance was concerned, but not out of form. Since then we have had the unfortunate event, in which a member of the Assembly appears to have been involved, of a minor gaining access to an X-rated video. As a result, we have amended section 19A of the principal Act to ensure that not even for political purposes should we access this material to a minor.
I am happy to move on to Mr Stevenson's comments about the Aboriginal communities having access to X-rated material. I am very amenable to any suggestion that Mr Stevenson or anyone in the community wants to put to me to prescribe or proscribe access by any Aboriginal communities in the ACT identified within the purview of our Bill and to invoke our powers to prevent any such access, if it is acceptable to that community. If Mr Stevenson can convince the community, then the power of prescription is there. He may have to go a long way to do it.
We have had a clear indication from Mr Stevenson that he may seek to see the prescriptions enlarged to ban access to this material by other Australians. That is not a practice that I will personally support, but it is there if he wants to press the issue. Mr Stevenson also said that we failed here to prevent the mail-order aspect. That rests with the Federal Parliament. As members will know, Senator Harradine's attempts last year to alter the postal
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