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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 2 Hansard (29 February) . . Page.. 514 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

We do not need to knock the inquiry system here in that manner. I was disappointed to hear you refer to a sterile inquiry. I thought that you were interested in making the inquiry not sterile by inviting the community and having a lot of people involved. Obviously, a practical trial is a very useful way of evaluating a proposal, but we want to see the guidelines. In the document you gave me one of the recommendations was that these guidelines be developed for a trial, and that is what we are asking for. I want to know which proposal in this paper you are looking at. I am still not even clear about whether it is going to be monitored or not, because there are a couple of proposals in this document you gave me. One of them was that the cameras were not monitored and one was that they were. There were different costs, of course, for the two proposals. Which have you decided on? What is the cost? What is the cost of the trial? How many jobs, police jobs or equivalent, are involved? One of the figures in your document looks to me like it involves at least four jobs. Where are the benefits for jobs against cameras? That is something that we would like to see evaluated a bit more. We want to see guidelines for the trial which would address the privacy concerns.

We want to see the evaluation mechanisms for the trial. Who is putting them together? We have no idea what they are. Is it like the smart card, where you let the person who put up the trial evaluate it? The ACT Community Safety Committee would be in charge, I think you said before, although I have not had that in writing either. I am sure that they would benefit by having these sorts of guidelines established before the trial. We members of this place would certainly benefit by having that information in front of us before we make a decision on this issue. We seem to have these sorts of "shoot from the hip" responses to a societal problem. Mr Osborne talked today about education in schools, but then we have him also proposing that we close the town down at 2.00 am, which does not sit all that well with the question of sophistication and tourism in the city.

Mr Osborne: No, it is 3 o'clock.

MS TUCKER: It is 3 o'clock now, is it? So we close the town down at 3.00 am, although everyone will go to the ANU bar anyway.

Mr Osborne: You have to be a member to go to the ANU bar.

MS TUCKER: You do not. I have been to the ANU bar plenty of times. We are a sophisticated city attracting tourists and we have cameras everywhere as well. Maybe the inquiry should look also at the idea of closing the town down at 3.00 am, because the two issues seem to be quite related. We have a problem with a minority of people in Civic who get drunk and who are violent, so why not let us look at the whole issue? I think this inquiry will show the members of the Assembly how the trial is going to be carried out, and it will assist the safety committee in establishing guidelines so that if there is going to be a trial it will be an effective one.

MR MOORE (4.16): It gives me pleasure to rise and support this motion, and particular pleasure to follow on from the very sensible comments made by my colleague Ms Tucker about how you would run a trial of this kind. If you are really genuine about a trial and you really want a genuine evaluation, you cannot simply slap on a trial and then say, "Oh, well, let us see what happens".

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