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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 3 Hansard (27 March) . . Page.. 687 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

The question of how we could approach violence is also about what the Australian Hotels Association has come up with. It is about making the industry accountable. It is not just crowd controllers; it is people working within the industry. They are interested in training people in serving people with alcohol. They are interested in improving the accountability of the industry, and that is good and it is cooperative. It could be about working more with the community, and the community safety committees that are already in place are a very good start for this sort of initiative.

On the broader questions of violence in the whole community, I am reminded of my work on the Social Policy Committee, where we are looking at violence in schools. You see quite clearly that these kids are now turning up in preschool, then you see them in primary school, and then you see them in high school. You can bet your bottom dollar that they are probably the ones you are going to see in Civic. Let us have a look at how we can bring real resourcing to early intervention, to parent support. These kids are often identified very early, and, while I understand that in adolescence things can happen, too, and that it is not always picked up very early, that is also an argument for resourcing our schools and our community services to support families in need so that they can find ways other than violence to deal with conflict.

It is only if we start looking at this in the broader community that we are going to avoid the situation where we need more police, we need more rules, we need more sentences, we need law and order. How about looking at it from the bottom, looking at preventing what is going wrong in our community and taking responsibility for it, not just coming with a big stick at the end and saying, "These people are bad and they are messing up our lives". These people have had troubled backgrounds, very often, and a community that is not supporting them. Why do we not look at that? In my committee work I noticed that one mother's comment was that bullies are not happy people. I do not think people who go around punching each other because they get drunk are necessarily happy people either, so why do we not look at the whole issue? In conclusion, I indicate that this is my response in principle to this Bill, but I will talk later about the amendments.

MR OSBORNE (11.28), in reply: Mr Speaker, it appears that I have enough support here to get my legislation up, and today I would like to thank the Government and Mr Moore for that. I would also like to thank the AHA, because it appears that they support some sort of restriction on alcohol, which is what we are debating here today. I would also like to thank the Labor Party and the Greens for raising some very valid arguments. I do not think anything they said today I would grossly disagree with, and they certainly raised some issues. However, after listening to the debate, I feel that it is necessary to clarify a number of points.

Firstly, Ms Follett asked whether or not the proposed trial would cover just Civic or the whole of Canberra. My understanding is that it would be a blanket cover across the whole of Canberra, so hopefully that clarifies the matter for Ms Follett. Secondly, I would like to go to another point that needs to be clarified. A lot of what Ms Follett said and a lot of what has been reported - and I believe that a number of petitions on this are about to be tendered in the Assembly - indicates that my proposal

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