Page 5066 - Week 17 - Wednesday, 12 December 1990
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The matter has also, of course, been addressed through the year by the Standing Committee on Social Policy, during its inquiry into public behaviour, and quite rightly so. There is no doubt that significant crowds do attend the Summernats. It is a very popular event - something which brings a large number of visitors to the community and something which puts money into the ACT community over what is generally considered to be a slow period within the hospitality industry, around Christmas-New Year. It is generally considered that a quite substantial amount of money comes into the community through the Summernats, and for that very reason I think it is fair to say that all sides of politics in this Assembly support the continuation of the Summernats. However, of course, it needs to be properly managed and controlled so that it does not get out of hand as it has in previous years.
There is no doubt that the majority of the participants and of the crowd are quite law-abiding and cause no problems. However, as with any large crowd, an event like this certainly does attract a certain hoodlum element who have caused problems when, on occasions, they have overflowed to the neighbouring suburbs, the suburbs of the inner north. The residents there are often people who have been in the area for quite some time. They are people who are certainly not young people; there may be middle-aged and elderly folk who often feel threatened by the presence of the sort of person who would attend a Summernats event.
It is fair to say that some of the past criticisms of the events in both 1988 and 1989 may well have been avoided if the event had been better planned and managed, and I think that is the very basis of the motion that Ms Follett has put up. For that reason an extensive amount of planning and management for this year's event has occurred. There have been ongoing meetings between members of the AFP, my Department of Urban Services, the National Exhibition Centre Trust and Street Machine Services Pty Ltd, which is the organisation which controls this particular meeting. They have canvassed a number of proposals to reduce the inconvenience caused to residents, and those included the banning of camping and parking on Northbourne Avenue.
I think the nature of the event demands that coordinated planning be ongoing to cater for contingencies as they arise. As I said, the planning group, comprising representatives of all those organisations, has been coordinating measures to ensure that parking and camping will be prohibited along Northbourne Avenue between Stirling Avenue and the Barton Highway. That is one example of some of the measures that we have taken this year. My department is arranging for temporary fencing to be erected along both sides of Northbourne Avenue in the vicinity of the National Exhibition Centre, to prevent parking and camping on the verges and the median strips. In order to minimise the impact of traffic congestion, signposts prohibiting parking and U-turns will be erected along Northbourne Avenue between Stirling Avenue and the
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