Page 1461 - Week 05 - Thursday, 12 May 1994
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I think this was an appropriate way to deal with not just education about alcohol but drug education generally. If we are going to have successful education, then we must ensure that young people are informed and empowered to make their own decisions with a full understanding of the ramifications of those decisions.
Having said that, Madam Speaker, I move to the issue of a proof of age card. We brought this report down in June 1993. On 16 June, the Council on the Ageing put out a very brief press release to the effect, "Why can we not be included in the proof of age card as well?". In my discussions with Mr Connolly in the last couple of days and in his remarks to the house a short while ago he has accepted that the proof of age card will be just that. I have some difficulty with the idea that a proof of age card really infringes civil liberties significantly, because it is a voluntary card. The whole point of the exercise is that somebody who wants it as an identifier can have it as an identifier.
Mr Connolly has raised here and with me the notion that a civil liberties protection would be a provision that a proof of age card cannot be demanded other than at specific times. Even then, it is not really being demanded of you. If you want to access a facility, then you have to show proof of age. That is a very different thing from a police officer, for example, in the middle of the street stopping somebody and saying, "I want to see your proof of age". I have no difficulty with a protection from that. As I understand it, a similar protection already exists for ordinary residents in the ACT. Other than where traffic offences are involved, a police officer cannot stop you and say, "Can I see your drivers licence?". I think that what we are really doing is just setting the same parameters for the proof of age card as would be set for a drivers licence. That was certainly the perception the committee had.
The Government has responded. Whether they did a backflip or not really does not matter to me. I am delighted that we have a positive response, and I look forward to the issue being debated as part of a piece of legislation that Mr Connolly will introduce to provide civil liberties protections. The motion that I have on the notice paper, which was on the daily program yesterday but which we did not get to, raises those issues. One of the reasons I was keen to see it come up again yesterday was that, to the best of my knowledge, we had not resolved the problem; that the pubcard was just a card for 18- to 25-year-olds, as indeed the press release Mr Connolly put out in April indicated. Certainly my interpretation of it was that it will be restricted in that way. So I do not believe that it will be necessary to bring that motion into the Assembly for debate. I think the debate we have had here today covers that, and I feel quite relaxed about it.
One of the things in the Government response that I found a little annoying was the very perfunctory response to our recommendation 18. The recommendation really did not have a great deal to do with our inquiry, but we had stumbled upon a piece of information and we suggested a method of dealing with it. The recommendation was:
That the Chief Minister consider referring to the Chief Minister's Youth Advisory Council for advice the issue of young people under the age of 18 years being required to pay 'adult' prices for goods and services.
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