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

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 2 Hansard (29 February) . . Page.. 515 ..

Mr Humphries: That is not the case, Michael, and you know it.

MR MOORE: You have to know beforehand what the circumstances are, not the sort of beat-up we hear from Gary Humphries about some young man who has been stabbed and not giving the full circumstances about what has happened, if indeed anybody actually knows. I realise that that is before the court, so I do not want to go into the details, and I think it was inappropriate for Mr Humphries to do so as well. I assume that when Gary Humphries was in Year 11, writing an essay about Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, he would - - -

Mr Humphries: I was never in Year 11.

MR MOORE: This would be the picture of Gary Humphries that I have. He would be writing about how to implement Big Brother. He probably would have got very high marks for it because nobody else would have been thinking along those lines. It would have been quite refreshing for a teacher who had just marked 30 essays, or in the ACT 40 essays, of the same type to get a nice fresh one from somebody like Gary Humphries. Unfortunately, the teacher would not realise that he was encouraging him down that line. He should have put a big line through the essay and said, "See me", and then discussed these issues - - -

Mr Humphries: I will see you out the back, Mr Moore, after this motion.

Ms Follett: The cameras will be on you.

MR MOORE: The interjection was, "I will see you around the back after this motion". Ms Follett kindly pointed out that there are cameras in place around the Assembly. I think Ms Follett very aptly drew attention to the appropriate use of cameras for very specific purposes. It may well be that there are some specific purposes for which these cameras can be trialled. It may well be, if this motion is successful and the matter goes to the Legal Affairs Committee, that they can set up the evaluation; they can see what it is that we want to achieve and they can ensure that it is worth doing this trial.

In doing the trial and setting up the evaluation, the before and after mechanisms, it also is very important to ensure that you have tested for confounding factors. You have just changed the way police patrol Civic. I have seen reported, in the same media that I am critical of about reporting the violence in Civic, that the police have now got it under control. If the police have been particularly successful over the last little while they deserve congratulations, and I am quite happy to do that.

Mr Humphries: So do we.

MR MOORE: Indeed, Minister; congratulations to you for ensuring that we do have more police presence in the area. Hopefully, that will be enough. I took time out, when you originally were toying with this idea, to put out a press release which I entitled "Moore Slams Humphries as Knee-Jerk". The subtitle was "Research Shows Cameras May Make Situation Worse". The only recent research on this issue that has been done in

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