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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 5 (Hansard) 16 May) . . Page.. 1330 ..

MS HORODNY (continuing):

Paintballing is even worse, I would say, than videos and arcade games because it is interactive. You are holding a gun. It is a gun that is a military weapon. You are wearing your modern camouflage gear. You are shooting people. I do not know what sort of message that sends to children. The weapon that you are using is a ball that contains paint. It seems like a very unhealthy game to me. You can say that it is harmless, just a bit of fun. For people who do have a balanced life and a happy and healthy life, perhaps this sort of activity forms just a very small component of the sorts of things that they do in their lives. Perhaps it is okay for those people. But, for people who do fester in this sort of activity and who live only for playing these sorts of games and watching unhealthy videos, I would say that it is another factor in increasing the amount of violence and unhealthy activity in our society.

I said in the debate that we had on this subject last time that other shires have banned this activity, and I think we need to look closely at why they did this. Other members in the Assembly, Mr Humphries particularly, pooh-poohed all of that. I think it would be a very good idea for Mr Humphries, as I said last time, to speak to those people and to get exact details of why they went to the extent of banning it in their shires when it was a very popular activity. Councillors in other shires, I understand, have also tried to ban it but unfortunately did not have the numbers in their local councils. I support Ms Follett's motion wholeheartedly. I would hope that other members in this Assembly, having had time to reconsider the issue of violence generally, will now support this motion.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General) (10.51): Mr Speaker, we had a debate on paintball fairly recently in the Assembly and I do not propose to make many comments. I want to make a couple of points that in some senses flow from the tragedy at Port Arthur. I think it behoves us as a community to look again at issues concerning the prevalence of violence in our community and to ask ourselves how we can work against what I think Ms Follett called a culture of violence in our community. I certainly believe that that needs to happen. I can say with some satisfaction that, to a large extent, it has happened as a result of the meeting of Police Ministers last Friday. There has been a major step taken towards winding back the prevalence of certain sorts of guns in the community. I do not pretend for a moment that that solves the problem. It clearly does not. There are many other issues to address.

The concern I have with the suggestion that we should outlaw paintball in this Territory is that there simply is not any empirical evidence about the impact of games of this kind in this circumstance. It may be that work can be done in an academic sense in the future on the issue of how people are influenced by representations of violence. We certainly can debate that once that evidence is available. But I am certainly not inclined to want to ban an activity because the supposition arises that it may result in some adverse impact on people's susceptibility to violence.

In the case of violent videos, this Government, as members would know, has been quite active in moving to take steps to restrict access to those videos, but this Government certainly does not support the banning of those videos. The Government merely has proposed that they be moved into a category where access is restricted and less likely to result in children seeing them. As members know, the regulations we have tabled for paintball exclude access by people under the age of 18 to this game.

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