Page 582 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 19 May 1992
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sensible thing to do. It is only quite recently that motorcyclists have been obliged to wear hard hats - again, not because we legislators sat here and said that we have to protect those people because they are incapable of protecting themselves; we did so because there was a public demand. Mr Moore, in that, is correct; the legislators, not only here but across Australia, made a judgment about the costs.
Now we are at the point where there is a rising public perception and a rising public demand that something be done to protect people riding bicycles. By and large, I think that flows from a concern for children who ride bicycles, as much as anything. But, as has been rightly pointed out, you cannot make artificial distinctions between 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds, or between public parks and public streets; so, you have to make a judgment about the costs and how far one should go in legislating for a person's safety.
I do not doubt for a minute that at some future time, as Mr Moore mentioned, we may well be discussing the question of whether people who ride skateboards should be protected in a similar fashion. I do not think that for the time being there is any evidence to suggest that it is anything like a problem - there is certainly no public perception that it is a problem - but at some future time it may well become so. It may happen during my time in this Assembly and we may well be sitting here discussing the issue of making people wear hard hats if they are going to use skateboards. That will be, again, because there is a demand from the public that we do so.
I have one final comment, Madam Speaker. I found it rather odd that Mr Moore argued against this piece of legislation, because I know that he is an ardent cyclist. I see him riding his bicycle to work in this building and I see him wearing a hard hat. He has made a judgment for himself that this is a prudent thing to do. Why should he argue that it is not equally as prudent to require somebody else to do the same thing? If you were one of the hardheads who are going to ride a bicycle without a hard hat and say, "I do not need to do so", there would be some logic to your argument that nobody should.
Mr Moore: Because I am a true liberal; that is why.
MR KAINE: Mr Moore is ambivalent on this subject, as he is with many others. He wants to protect himself when he rides a bicycle, but he does not think that anybody else should be protected. There seems to me to be a certain ambivalence in that.
For my part, Madam Speaker, I support this legislation - not because I alone think it is a good idea, but because I have had a lot of indications from the community out there that they think it is a good idea, that the public purse should be protected, that their tax dollars should be protected, in our hospital systems and elsewhere, and that there is an obligation, where parents do not protect their children, for the community to do so. For that reason, and that reason alone, I support this legislation. I do not think there is much more argument that can be mounted about it, Madam Speaker.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (9.12), in reply: I rise to close the debate on this matter. I think it has been a very constructive debate on both sides. One of the most telling things that were said was said in different ways by both my colleague Mr Lamont and Mr De Domenico when they both referred to their own children. Mr Lamont said that he was approaching this primarily from the point
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