Page 4792 - Week 16 - Monday, 25 November 1991
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Where is Labor's strategy? I have not seen it yet. We do not know what it is. We know that already this year in the Assembly they have refused an inquiry into the liquor industry. Apparently it is too hard to consider the issues to do with the supply of alcohol in the Territory. They are rejecting this Bill. They are cutting back police numbers and resources. What exactly is Labor's strategy? It seems to me to be a strategy designed to enhance and increase alcohol consumption in this community, not reduce it. For goodness sake, let us get real.
This bleating about the committee report is entirely subjective and, I think, ought to be put to rest straightaway. There have been plenty of committee reports in this Assembly, all of them expensive, all of them carefully conducted on a bipartisan basis, which this Government has completely and utterly rejected. Can I remind the Assembly that there is before it at the moment a report by the Estimates Committee that was much more expensive than the Social Policy Committee report on young people's behaviour and which recommended that there be an increase in funding for non-government schools. That falls on totally deaf ears across the way.
Let us not pretend that the expense of an inquiry report, the number of words in it or the number of people who sat on the committee has any bearing at all on its acceptability to the Australian Labor Party. The basic criterion as far as those opposite are concerned is: Does it accord with Labor Party policy? If it does, it is a wonderful piece of foresight that we are all mugs not to accept. If it does not, it is partisan, it is wrong, it has been conceived for political reasons, it is just one of those things used by the conservatives to rip the heart out of the people of Canberra. That is basically the dichotomy we are faced with in this place.
Finally, I point out that this Bill does not entail automatic fines of $400. That is rubbish. It entails a maximum penalty of $400 for consumption of liquor in prescribed public places. Those sorts of powers, I think, we can expect our police force to exercise responsibly. We are not going to see people hauled in for first offences. I think we are going to see some care exercised by police. Even when people do come before the courts, they are rarely going to incur fines of anything like $400. That is the maximum penalty, and only offenders who consistently transgress will face penalties of that kind, I suspect.
For all those reasons, I believe that we have before us far-sighted legislation highly deserving of passage. I will be supporting it, and I believe that most in this Assembly will. I think it is a matter we can all be proud about. We are responding directly to the concerns of the people of Canberra. It is probably one of those few things we will do in this session of the Assembly that we can proudly point to and say, "This is serving the needs of our community and this is how we are doing it. We believe that we can stand up with pride on this matter".
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