Page 4627 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 15 December 1993
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Even where parents are in major conflict with their children and they wind up paying, the extra costs to the community may well be more vandalism. These are the relationships that lead children to flout the law and wind up with us having to put a great deal more money into the criminal justice system as well as the social help system.
The legislation assumes that the sins of the children are the fault of the parents. There is a certain amount of that there and I think that it is a dangerous assumption. To a certain extent, that is an exaggeration of what Mr Cornwell's Bill seeks; but that is an underlying concept within that. The other point I would like to make is that young people invariably are much more influenced by their peers than they are by their parents. What we need to do is to continue to fund appropriate methods of influencing children who are involved in vandalism, rather than taking this particular approach.
I would like to finish by painting a scenario of parents with low income, with six children, and with one child perhaps not getting quite enough attention. One way that that attention is sought from the parents is through vandalism. The difficulty is that the parents wind up with a reduced income when they have to pay for that child's vandalism and invariably the other children miss out and the problems are exacerbated. So what do we get? We wind up with a very angry family with this recalcitrant, for want of a better choice of word to use, who actually is bailed out, not having to bear the responsibility of his or her actions. They have not been asked to wear the responsibility of their own action but in fact are left with a sense of guilt in terms of what they have done to the rest of the family. I use that scenario to illustrate why I am going to vote against this Bill, even though I would emphasis that I realise that Mr Cornwell has presented it with a good intention. On a cost-benefit analysis, really the costs far outweigh the benefits.
MS SZUTY (12.26): I, like my colleague Mr Moore, will not be supporting the legislation that Mr Cornwell has put before the Assembly. I take on board the very eloquent comments made in this debate by both Mr Connolly and Mr Moore. Another issue that I think probably has not been canvassed very extensively at this stage is that this is a Bill which basically penalises parents who can pay. It does not really say anything much about what happens in situations where parents cannot pay for the damage that their young people might do. Families who are already socially disadvantaged will be potentially at greater disadvantage and will not be offered any further support. Potentially, children from abusive or neglectful homes will be further put at risk as a result of Mr Cornwell's legislation.
Madam Speaker, I think it would be more appropriate to ensure that there are adequate intervention services available for dysfunctional families, measures such as appropriate and adequate school holiday and out of school hours entertainment for young people and children, to make sure that they are fully occupied and do not turn their attention to such activities as vandalism, including graffiti work which we have discussed at other times in this Assembly.
I believe that Mr Cornwell is trying to address an issue which is obviously of concern in our community, but they are very much punitive measures that he is proposing. I would prefer to see the Assembly and our community take a preventative approach to action of this kind. I think we will be doing much better by our community if we think of preventative measures that we can take to
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