Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 2 Hansard (29 February) . . Page.. 508 ..

MS FOLLETT (continuing):

absolutely beyond any shadow of a doubt that the concerns I have put forward are shared by many. I believe that, in making this kind of decision, the Assembly, the community and the Government should be weighing the relative merits of this form of security against the very real need of our community for civil liberties protection, not invasion.

I commend my motion to the Assembly. I can assure people that, if the matter does go to the Legal Affairs Committee, as a member of that committee I am prepared to listen to all views on this matter. The issues I have raised in debate today are issues which have occurred to me, which I know are shared by many but for which there may well be a proper response. Until we have properly tested those issues, I believe that it is totally premature to behave as Mr Humphries appears to be about to do.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General) (3.53): Mr Speaker, the Government opposes this motion. I want to explain, first of all, how it came about that there was an announcement on the radio this morning concerning this matter. I have for some time had before me a proposal for the establishment of closed-circuit television cameras in Civic, made by a private security firm, a quite major firm in Canberra, Wormald Security, offering the Government the use for free of a number of cameras for a trial period to establish the effectiveness of those cameras as a tool towards reducing and detecting crime. As members will know, that proposal was made some time ago. In the meantime, I have been having extensive discussions with a number of parties and people about the proposal. I discussed it with Ms Follett's predecessor as Opposition spokesperson on police matters.

Ms Follett: You disagreed.

MR HUMPHRIES: Not quite. Your predecessor indicated his willingness to consider a process whereby it could be explored further. I also discussed the proposal I had with a number of members of the crossbenches - there is some disagreement about how many of them it was, but certainly a number of members of the crossbenches - suggesting that the best way of proceeding to examine the issues relating to this matter was not through another sterile inquiry or review or assessment about the issues in an abstract sense but, rather, through an active trial of the concept, which would be monitored by a process that would produce a clear indication of how this concept worked in the ACT context - not in England or in Brisbane or in some other place, but here in the ACT.

I maintain that that is the best way of determining whether or not this concept is worth while to explore. I firmly believe that the benefits of that process, the benefits of sitting down and having a trial to examine what issues are given rise to, is greatly superior to the concept of a further inquiry by the Legal Affairs Committee, not concluding until September this year, then further debate in the Assembly on the result of that inquiry, presumably, with some hope of towards the end of this year coming to some kind of resolution, and, if the answer is positive, then presumably starting a trial at this time next year rather than now.

I do not believe that this Assembly has the luxury of sitting around for a further 12 months while problems in Civic multiply. In the last four years problems in Civic Centre in Canberra have risen dramatically. I do not need to repeat the fact that under the previous Government crime overall rose by something like 40 per cent in the

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .