Page 1766 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 18 August 1992
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get to the point of prosecution because a sensible police officer would realise immediately that that had been picked up by the law and would not book you for the telephone or what have you. The sensible point that some objects can give out a signal that operates as a jamming device is well taken. We thought about it; we provided the defence.
To go on further and say that people have a right to have a radar jamming device is a proposition the Government fundamentally disagrees with. The parliaments of Victoria, New South Wales and other States have fundamentally disagreed with it. Basically, a radar jammer is purchased solely for the purpose of jamming police radar, solely for the purpose of breaking the law and not being detected. That is something that parliaments in other jurisdictions have legitimately said is not acceptable. I hope we would say that it is not acceptable because of the obvious safety factor. Your point about unintended consequences is well made. It would have been a legitimate criticism of the Bill had we not picked it up, but we have picked it up.
MR HUMPHRIES (4.53): I think it is worth reflecting for a moment on the reason those provisions about the radar detector and jammer bans appear in this legislation. I think the Minister made reference to it in his presentation speech; I cannot recall. The Commonwealth made arrangements with the ACT and other States some two years ago as a response to a series of quite horrendous accidents on Australian roads. The Federal Government took the view that a series of measures - a 10-point plan, I recall - would be appropriate to deal with these problems in such a way that the community as a whole was going to indicate a get-tough approach on factors that led supposedly to the incidence of accidents on our roads, particularly on roads with higher speed limits. Although there are arguments about some of those measures, I think the package as a whole has been a welcome move. That is certainly why, after extensive debate, the Alliance Government supported the 10-point package and would have been moving legislation such as this had it still been in power.
There are some aspects of this Bill which do rather raise the question of what people's rights are, in certain respects, to conduct themselves in their cars or on the roads in certain ways, and the debate about bicycle helmets has already been raised. That was seen by some in our community as a terribly onerous and burdensome infringement of their right to conduct themselves as they saw fit on the road. I do not take the argument Mr Stevenson has put up about this being in that category. I believe, as the Attorney has indicated, that it is important to be able to cover this kind of beating of the rules, and the Opposition, therefore, would not be prepared to support the amendment Mr Stevenson has put forward.
However, I hope that in future, when we develop strategies for dealing with deaths on our roads, we examine them in the context of the way in which they will be most effective and the way in which the community as a whole would respond to those things as being appropriate to their own communities. For example, I do not know that there would be a great deal of point in having radar detectors if they were for use exclusively in the Australian Capital Territory. My understanding is that they are not very much good in urban areas because of interference from other things.
Mr Berry: How would you come to understand that?
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