Page 1239 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 11 May 1993
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Madam Speaker, these particular attacks are very different from my having a go at Mr Berry about his brain. I am sure that he will have the opportunity to come back and have a go at me. That sort of parliamentary light-heartedness is very different from suggesting that somebody is actually going to promote violence or that somebody does not care about their kids. There is no way that anybody is promoting violence. If there were any way in which violence could be promoted, it would be just as sensible to argue that clause 20 would do that. I do not intend to argue that way, Madam Speaker, because it is clearly not the intention of Mr Berry to do that at all. Clearly his intention comes out of a genuine concern - and I recognise that - about violence in this sport.
The difference, in our opinion, is that you can either do it by banning or do it by codes of conduct. I am prepared to support this Bill and I am prepared to support the amendment that has been foreshadowed by Ms Szuty, simply because of that genuine concern to avoid promoting violence and because I have a genuine concern for my own children, as I am sure Mrs Carnell has for her children, in saying that we should regulate kick boxing and boxing. That is why we are interested in the Bill. That is why we have taken the time and care to read it. It is not because we want to promote violence or because we do not care for our kids. That stuff is crazy.
MR DE DOMENICO (8.47): Madam Speaker, I will be very brief. Mr Cornwell, my colleague, spoke quite eloquently - as did Mr Humphries - about Bob Jones. Many years ago, unfortunately too many, I was a student at Melbourne University. I was lucky enough to be trained by Mr Bob Jones in a form of karate called Shotokhan. I can tell you that, like other forms of karate, believe it or not, one uses the fists and the feet. But most of the time, for three-and-a-half of my four years' training in karate, I concentrated not on landing blows but on defending myself against blows from somebody else.
If Mr Berry had taken the trouble of speaking to the people concerned, the World Kickboxing Association and others in the areas of martial arts, he would have known that the best thing that people get out of such forms of sport - and they are sport - is the fact that they are taught how to defend themselves, they are taught how to breathe properly and they are taught various other things.
Mr Humphries: Self-discipline.
MR DE DOMENICO: Self-discipline. As Mr Moore, Ms Szuty and everybody else who spoke on this topic said, it is that sort of discipline that makes it a very popular sport throughout the world. Kick boxing is just another form of martial arts. I would also like to say to Mr Berry that in fact fewer blows are landed on someone's head in the sport of kick boxing than in normal boxing, because of the fact that kick boxers are very highly trained and very highly skilled. That is point No. 1.
Point No. 2 is that - like Mr Moore and Mrs Carnell, who have young children, as others do - I would not permit my kids to participate in the sport of kick boxing, because I personally believe that they would get hurt. But, if some other parent or some other individual wants to participate in that sport, why should they be banned? The only reason why you are going to try to ban the sport is the philosophy of someone in the Labor Party in the ACT. Nowhere else has the Labor Party banned it. Some radical in the ALP in the ACT has said to Mr Berry, "You shall ban kick boxing".
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