Page 1813 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 15 June 1993
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The committee came to grips with the fact that this problem is one that upsets the lives of many young people, and there is no simple solution. Mrs Grassby is quite right in saying that the pubcard on its own is not a solution, and the committee did not suggest that it was. The more the committee looked at the issue, the wider it believed the solution to be and the more lateral it had to be as it addressed the problem. That is why the recommendations address a wide range of areas, from the educational areas such as on-the-job training for bartenders and for those involved in serving alcohol, and education for parents and young people, through to ensuring that people know their rights in this area, so that young people as well as bartenders and others know exactly what they can expect from the system.
On the proof of age card, or the pubcard, as it is more appropriately called, the thing that was most interesting to me was the quite dramatic support this card had from the young people we spoke to. I think there was only one exception, and that was one young lady who suggested that she did not really think a pubcard was a good idea because it would make it harder for her to get into the club she frequents. That seemed to me to be a pretty good reason for having a pubcard.
I accept Mrs Grassby's comments that the pubcard would make it easier for people who own bars, clubs, and so on, but I think that is a good thing as well. When Mr Moore and I went out with the police to see what Canberra was like after midnight, it was very interesting to see long queues of young people lining up to get into certain nightclubs, with their birth certificates and other documentary evidence of their age. That seemed to be an incredibly inappropriate approach. Obviously, there is a need for some sort of card with a photograph on it. Those 18-year-olds who do not have a drivers licence, and there are a number of them, are placed in an uncomfortable situation. Having to prove their age without a drivers licence, without any documentary evidence of age, is very difficult. Many people do not even have their birth certificate, unless they have had another reason to get one.
The privacy issue was raised, and I think that has been addressed in the report. The matter that neither of my colleagues addressed at length is the recommendation that a working party should be set up to look at establishing a proclaimed place, certainly in the Civic area and then in other parts of Canberra. The committee was very interested, when we went to the Manly area of Sydney, to look at the proclaimed place that is run by the Manly council. We were impressed because it was an area in which young people obviously felt particularly comfortable, an area that kept young people out of the criminal justice system, out of the cells overnight, and so on. Anything we as a society can do to achieve that amongst under 18-year-olds who may have had a few too many to drink has to be a very good idea. In Manly, they did not use the proclaimed place only for drying out purposes, they used it also for counselling. The people who looked after it after hours were often off-duty policemen. They established a substantially better relationship with the young people involved, many of whom did not have a tremendously good relationship with the criminal justice system and with the police force as such. It can be used in a much more wide-ranging way than just as a proclaimed place.
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