Page 2844 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 September 1994
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MR CONNOLLY: As I say, this is not just about fire. It is about public safety. The clear police view is that we have had improvements in public safety inside premises since these rules were set. While it may be safer from a fire perspective to be in a ground floor bar as opposed to a second floor bar, from a public safety and public order perspective - monitoring crowd behaviour, monitoring under-age drinking, monitoring offences - it matters not whether you are on the first or the second or the third floor.
The Building Code of Australia provides an objective, sound basis for crowd control and for crowd numbers. That is why the Government acted on the Building Code of Australia. We in good faith spoke to industry. We went to our public safety advisers, and the advice that we got - and, as I understand it, the advice that remains from those ACT Government authorities responsible for this matter - is against any change. It is a matter for the Assembly.
MR HUMPHRIES (9.21): Mr Acting Speaker, I think the Minister is right when he says that he senses that the Government is not going to succeed. I draw that conclusion from the childish way in which the Attorney presented his arguments tonight. Arguments with the sophistication of "Bah, humbug, Liberal Party! Bah, humbug, Liberal Party!" seem to suggest to me that the Minister has run out of logical arguments and needs to resort to a bit of old-fashioned name calling. The Liberal Party has not lightly gone down the path of recommending the amendments moved by Mrs Carnell.
I want to put the Minister right on the question of consultation. We did have an invitation to consult with officers such as the Fire Commissioner and officers of the Liquor Licensing Board, and we took up that option. We had meetings with those people. I think, Mr Acting Speaker, for the Minister to suggest, perhaps for the purposes of debate in this place, that there has not been that consultation, to suggest that we have made this up on the run and we have not thought this through, is quite unfair.
My understanding, Mr Acting Speaker, is that the Fire Commissioner is comfortable with the approach which has been suggested here and believes that it is capable of being made to work. In those circumstances I think the better approach is the one suggested by Mrs Carnell, because it acknowledges that the present arrangement is inflexible and does not always deliver a logical result. Above all, I think we need to be working in this place towards outcomes which make sense to people in an ordinary, everyday environment. Certainly, some of the outcomes being produced at the present time in that respect do not make sense either to owners of premises in this community or to patrons. I am not suggesting that they necessarily have a better view of these things than do fire officers or police; but I do suggest that there is certainly scope for more flexibility, and that is what Mrs Carnell's approach produces.
It is scandalously untrue to suggest that hers is the kind of callously profit oriented approach which Mr Connolly has referred to. Mrs Carnell's approach is designed to make safety an uppermost consideration at all stages, but to provide more flexibility than is inherent in the present approach of the Government.
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