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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 2 Hansard (29 February) . . Page.. 511 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

in the bus interchanges of this city. What justification do you have to put them in in the Belconnen bus interchange, and, I am told, in the Tuggeranong interchange as well, and to cry foul when we do the same thing in Civic? You people are blatant, unabashed, barefaced hypocrites, and it shocks me that people in this place are prepared to swallow that line and accept your point of view. I am quite astonished.

I reject Ms Follett's assertion - she has again left the chamber; she never seems to stay after she has made her speech; she likes to run off and do something else - that the cameras are of no use whatever unless they are continually monitored. Ms Follett overlooks what is a very important role of cameras, and that is that, apart from the role in alerting people to contemporaneous events taking place under the sight of cameras, they have a use as a recording device to use as evidence to bring against people who have committed crimes. The resources that police spend in this community detecting crime that has already occurred are huge, very extensive resources. If we have avenues at our disposal to minimise that cost, to reduce that cost, that is money we can spend on other socially important things.

Ms Follett also suggests that crime will simply move away. Perhaps she is right; perhaps she is not. I do not think she is entirely right. There is some crime that will move away, I quite agree; but others will not be able to move, because they are not crimes that are planned. They are spontaneous crimes or they are crimes that are affected by the presence of cameras. If someone wants to mug somebody else, a dark alley might be very convenient for that crime; but, if the person is not moving through that dark alley, it is of no use whatever. If a person wants to smash a shop window, the existence of the shop in the view of the camera does not assist the person who might want to sneak down the alley and commit that crime. If a person wants to exchange drugs in a public place, they will have to persuade the person they want to sell them to to come down the dark alley with them. There are crimes that I think will be detected and, of course, also prevented by the presence of those cameras; but we can find out only by proceeding with some kind of empirical examination of that issue, and that is the trial I have been talking about.

Ms Follett asserts that cameras invade our privacy. If Ms Follett were serious about that she should have drawn a line about it when she was in government at some previous point in time long, long ago. Cameras are now a very pervasive part of our community. If we are going to have this concept of use in a commercial way in our community, if private shopkeepers are entitled to put cameras up in their shops and film us moving about their shops and outside the banks and other public places like that, I want to see the cameras used to my benefit, and that is to prevent crime in public places, where members of the public at the present time feel unsafe moving about those public places.

Mr Moore: They feel unsafe because you have been beating it up for four years.

MR HUMPHRIES: That is not true. It has long been the case that we have had a serious problem in those parts of Canberra, and it is appropriate that members of the Assembly and of parliament draw attention to that fact. Mr Moore obviously believes that crime is only the creation of people in the media and in politics. I can assure him that that is not the case. Mr Amsteins, for example, almost lost his life in a public place in the

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