Page 3420 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 13 October 1993
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Windscreen Cleaning
MRS GRASSBY: My question is to the Minister for Urban Services. There has been some publicity lately about young people wishing to clean windscreens at traffic lights. Undoubtedly, people travel at between 60 and 70 kilometres an hour down some of our main roads. Is this activity safe and will you allow this to continue?
Mr De Domenico: They do not do it when the cars are moving. It is when the cars are stopped that they wash the windscreens.
MADAM SPEAKER: Order!
MR CONNOLLY: Madam Speaker, this is a serious question. It relates to safety, but the Opposition members are having a bit of a cackle about it. My office over recent months has received a lot of complaints from members of the public about being hassled at intersections, with people in many cases demanding payment for having wiped a windscreen. A lot of people, particularly elderly Canberra people, find that quite threatening. Mrs Carnell thinks it is very funny, but I can assure her that a lot of her constituents do not think it is very funny. We have nothing against people showing a bit of enterprise and initiative. Indeed, it is a good thing when young people show a bit of enterprise and initiative. But doing it in a way that breaks the law is not something that I would have thought the Liberals would want to encourage. Do you encourage people to show enterprise by allowing them to break the law? If so, you would be promoting people showing enterprise by allowing them to deal in narcotics. Clearly, if people want to show enterprise they ought to do it lawfully. Running a lawn-mowing business is a good example.
Running onto the carriageway, Madam Speaker, at an intersection controlled by lights is a breach of the Motor Traffic Act and carries a penalty of $100. I have seen fit to draw that to the public's attention and to say to these young people, "You are breaking the law; but, more importantly, you are engaging in a very dangerous activity". Knowing that this growing practice is a breach of the law and very dangerous, if the Government sat back and did nothing and failed to enforce the law, when the first young person was killed or injured we would be held to account in this Assembly. We are not prepared to do that.
Given that the Government says that the Earth is round, the Opposition has to say that the Earth is flat; so the Opposition got themselves into a lather yesterday saying, "You are beating up on enterprising young Canberrans". I was interested to hear from some of the TV crews who were chasing around yesterday to speak to some of these people that in fact many of them are not enterprising young Canberrans at all. They are international backpackers who tend to engage in this sort of fundraising exercise wherever they happen to be. One of the groups that one of the TV crews caught onto yesterday was a group of young Brits who are out here on a working holiday. So some of these people are not even your enterprising young Canberrans, Opposition. They are in fact visitors.
Madam Speaker, while we applaud enterprise in Canberra's young people, and we would applaud any teenager who is doing lawn-mowing rounds or whatever, running onto the carriageways of Canberra's major roads, particularly those roads that have speed limits of 70 or 80 kilometres an hour, which a lot of them do, to wipe the windows of cars is very dangerous to those pedestrians.
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