Page 4904 - Week 16 - Tuesday, 26 November 1991
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effective attendants. We have had incidents in the chamber. I recall seeing one of our now recently departed journalists put into a headlock in the journalists row. I think it was an attempt to get at me as Attorney over domestic violence issues. We have seen other intrusions in the chamber.
Whilst the public probably do not feel sympathetic towards politicians - I accept that - the fact is that we have a number of staff and other people about us who share our vulnerability but who are not paid, and do not necessarily have the aspirations that we have, to take those risks. I believe that it is totally unprecedented in this nation for the security of this building to be turned off in part of the dark hours. I have been to a number of parliaments in this nation, to conferences, to visit friends and the like. I have always seen guards there, even when I have attended late night meetings. Because you are not known in those places you are always interrogated. The guards check what you are carrying and so on.
That is not so in this place. On several occasions late at night in this building I have run across people wandering around. In fact, on two occasions they have been people who came to political branch meetings on the fifth floor. On one occasion Mr Jensen and I met a person carrying a wine glass. That was at 10 or 11 o'clock at night. He got in the lift and got off at the third floor. I do not know whom he was visiting, but he was very cheery. He referred us to the Iraqi war and the Woden branch, as I recall it.
I believe that it was the day that Mr Connolly brought members of a branch in to see how he was going, but they did not seem to be too right wing in their comments on the fifth floor. Those branch meetings are held on public property. Many of them drag on, and when you are waiting for the lift you cannot help hearing a few snatches about this and that. Funnily enough, it is not Mr Kaine or me they are talking about. It is most illuminating to see branch meetings in the new suite opposite the lift.
I trust that the Labor Party know who is present there and that they will look towards the security. If they do not, then I believe that it is the Speaker's responsibility. I wrote to the Speaker recently and expressed concern about that. As members know, I was bailed up in the lift by an obviously inebriated person who abused me all the way through the foyer here on the night of an Estimates Committee hearing. You know who it is. I will go no further. The abuse was such that a guard came across to see whether everything was okay.
Ms Follett: We do not know who it was.
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