Page 1652 - Week 06 - Thursday, 13 August 1992
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (12.21): The Minister can brush this off lightly. The Government is going to continue to do this. No matter how much concern the clause generates, they are still going to brush it off lightly.
I think what Mr Westende pointed out is worth reiterating. We are, first of all, proposing that subclause 18(1) be deleted. That is because we do not believe that rodeos necessarily ought to be banned. Mr Westende indicated that further on, under the clause related to circuses, where a circus may be conducted with a licence, we believe that the same thing should apply to a rodeo. If somebody wants to do this - and it is very interesting that nobody has for some years, and maybe nobody ever will - they can come along to the authority and get a licence, and the licence can be issued under whatever conditions the authority deems prudent. We are suggesting that the debate about whether or not you can promote, conduct or take part in a rodeo should be taken out of here and we can debate it later on in terms of licences.
The other point about this is in the severity of the offence. Whether you leave the rodeo clause in or take it out, what this says is that to promote something is equally as serious a crime as to conduct that activity. There are clearly differences in the severity of the offence here, yet the penalty is the same. If I go out onto the street and say to somebody, "You should go to Ashton's Circus", I am promoting the circus and I can be hit with a $10,000 fine or a year in gaol, or both. If I say, "You should go to the rodeo down the road on Saturday", I am put in exactly the same class as the person who actually conducts the rodeo and who may be inflicting cruelty on animals.
Surely there is a question of the severity of the offence here. To say that the penalty for both shall be the same is, in my view, totally unreasonable. If they want to prescribe a penalty for promoting something, that is fine; but let us have it in some sort of perspective in terms of the severity of the crime. If the Minister will listen, he might like to take that under advisement and consider whether or not the Bill ought to be amended.
While I am on my feet in connection with clause 18, Madam Speaker, I guess I can debate subclause (3) as well. This is one of those interesting cases where only two days ago both Mr Lamont and Mr Connolly, when we raised the question of trout fishing down at the aquarium as being a major offence under this Bill, pooh-poohed the idea. Mr Lamont said, "What a lot of rubbish! You are drawing a long bow". Mr Wood, fortunately, took the point, because he has come back with an amendment to exclude fish from this provision. He knows that, without that amendment to his Bill, if I go down to the National Aquarium next week, after this Bill is passed, and throw a line into the trout pool and pull a fish out, the people operating that game park, by definition, are guilty of an offence that is going to cost them $10,000 or a year in gaol.
It was only after we brought it to the Minister's attention that he came back with the amendment. Mr Lamont and Mr Connolly said, "That is absolute rubbish". This is one of the unintended consequences that we keep talking about. The people who drafted this did not think it through.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .