Page 4787 - Week 16 - Monday, 25 November 1991
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Mr Kaine: Do that too. Has it occurred to you to do that as well?
MR BERRY: We are doing it. We are not going to adopt the punitive approach. We are not all rushing around trying to grab the law and order vote. We are about fixing the problem and creating a just society, not a punitive society. That is the difference between Labor and the conservative members opposite. Every one of them sees that there are a couple of votes amongst people who are alleged to be frightened. They even stir up a scare campaign themselves, trying to whip up a bit of fear in the community from anecdotal evidence, which has not been accepted even by a very expensive committee of this Assembly that looked at the issue.
Let us be fair dinkum about this. This is discrimination against our young people, our juveniles. They are the people who will be affected by this. It will always be the young people who are affected by it. It is similar to the approach we have heard from Mr Stefaniak on so many other occasions. It is the old "Lock 'em up and Break Their Skateboards" Bill Stefaniak. That is what Bill Stefaniak is about: The punitive approach and prohibition. It died in the Depression in 1932. It is finished.
We are certainly more modern in our approach these days. Everybody is more modern in their approach, except the people in this Assembly who see that they can rake a few law and order votes out of the community in the lead-up to an election. This is election time. We talk about this season of the year as the silly season, but it is doubly bad in this place because we have an election coming up in February. All these law and order issues will now be raked out by the people opposite in order to grab those few very important votes to get them past the threshold. This is no more than a political stunt and ought to be treated as such by the responsible members of this Assembly. Labor will be opposing this Bill.
MR STEVENSON (12.06): This Bill is about making certain areas of Canberra safer, and I commend Mr Stefaniak for introducing the amendment. Mr Connolly said that it was reactive legislation, as though there was something wrong with reacting to a call from people. It would be far better if members of this Assembly, and any other parliament in Australia, reacted more readily to a call by a majority of people in their community to take action. It would be far better than politicians thinking up what they would like to do - unfortunately, all too often aligned to their ideological desires.
Mr Connolly also mentioned at length, as did other Labor members, the public behaviour report of the Standing Committee on Social Policy, of which I was a member. Mr Connolly suggested that the members had concluded that the amendments Bill Stefaniak now proposes were unnecessary.
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