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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 3 Hansard (27 March) . . Page.. 683 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

to try to get the least possible harm associated with the use of this particular drug, alcohol? That is why, when Mr Osborne approached me and said that he wanted to use this approach, I said that I believed that it could be done only if it was properly evaluated and was done on a trial basis, so that we would then have some proper information on which to base our decision.

I heard Ms Tucker on the radio, I think, yesterday talking about a piece of research that was done in the Northern Territory, which we must extrapolate from. It is appropriate for us to look at that and to extrapolate. However, if a body such as the Australian Institute of Criminology were doing research on a trial such as this, the first thing they would do is a literature search. They would go right through all the literature available and present the ideas that have come internationally on what happens with closing hours. They would then set out a protocol for how they would conduct the trial, before any trial began.

At that stage, it may be that the information is so overwhelming that we unanimously agree that we ought not proceed with a trial because there will be too much damage, because there are ethical problems, or because the aim of the trial simply cannot be met, because no problem exists in the first place, that it has just been a beat-up. Indeed, most of us who watched the issue of violence in Civic as it was presented to us, particularly through the Canberra Times and other media outlets as well, at the beginning of this year, would probably agree that there was a significant beat-up. We still live in probably the safest city in Australia, which probably makes it amongst the safest cities in the world. That does not mean, though, that we can ignore it when violence does occur, and it does mean that we have responsibilities to make our city even safer, if we can. That safety does not apply just to walking in our streets; it applies also to what happens in the home, and that is certainly the issue Ms Tucker raised in relation to the Northern Territory research. No doubt she will talk about it later. The findings in the Northern Territory research indicate that there was an increase in violence in homes. There are huge cultural differences between the ACT and the Northern Territory; so we have to be very careful how we extrapolate from that, and it may well be that a trial is necessary to understand those issues and how they apply in the ACT.

They are the sorts of reasons why I originally gave my support, qualified by the fact that it had to be a trial monitored by a body such as the Australian Institute of Criminology, and Mr Humphries and Mr Osborne seemed to settle on the Australian Institute of Criminology as the appropriate body to examine this proposal. Since that time, Mr Osborne's actions have brought about a whole series of other actions. The most notable of those has been the response by the AHA - in one sense voluntarily, but I think under the huge amount of pressure Mr Osborne has brought by introducing this legislation - to put up a code of conduct that will deal with the sorts of issues Ms Follett raised about serving people alcohol when they are clearly inebriated.

The issue here is that people are being served to make a buck. The threat Mr Osborne has put out is that they are going to lose a lot more bucks by proceeding with irresponsible conduct. It seems to me that the AHA, in a proposal that I first saw either yesterday or the day before - a seven- or eight-point plan - indicated that they were prepared now to take some action. It is important for us to examine that, and I am happy to discuss it with Mr Osborne - I have already discussed it with Mr Humphries -

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