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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 5 (Hansard) 16 May) . . Page.. 1339 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

Quite seriously, Mr Speaker, if a couple of adults choose to go out into the forest on a Saturday afternoon and shoot pellets of paint at each other and that is regarded somehow as an intent to harm, maim or degrade, or somehow cause the sort of impact upon our society that some in this Assembly today suggest, I would suggest that there are a lot of other things that we should be looking at first. There are a number of sports where, without doubt, the aim is to maim or degrade or to hurt. When people go into a scrum or a tackle they do not say to the other side, "There, there; I hope that you come out feeling as well as you did when you came in". We as a society, or as an Assembly, have not chosen to ban or to remove those sorts of activities from our society.

We are talking about a weapon that happens to shoot gelatine pellets with paints in them, and the assumption is that somehow this constitutes violence when there is no aim to hurt, to cause pain or to degrade. There is no unlawful exercise of physical force. There are none of those things that would tend to indicate violence. This motion seems to me to be a step over the line that Mr Moore spoke about. I do not like guns, Mr Speaker. I have no ambition to play such a game. But there are many people who obviously do not feel the same way, who do not feel that violence is associated with guns, and I do not believe that it is hypocritical to take this approach.

Our approach in this Assembly, consistently, on both sides of this house, has been that adults have a right to live their lives the way they choose, as long as they do not impact upon other people, as long as they do not attempt to force their own standards of living upon other people in our society and, of course, as long as they operate within the law. In this case I find it very difficult to understand how, taking into account that attitude on both sides of the house, we can then say that adults over the age of 18 - those under the age of 18 cannot do it - have no right to go out into the forest with some gelatine capsules of paint and play what is, let us be fair, a game. I do not like it, but I believe strongly in the freedom of individuals. I believe strongly, as this side of the house does, in the right of people to live their own lives.

MS FOLLETT (11.27), in reply: Mr Speaker, I would like to thank all members for their contributions to this debate; but I think it is only fair to say that Mr Moore and the speakers from the Government side have entirely missed the point, and, I suspect, deliberately so. I moved this motion, as I said right at the start, Mr Speaker, in order to challenge what is a developing culture of violence in our community. I have said on many occasions that I will challenge that culture of violence whenever and wherever I can.

I am not talking, as Mr Humphries appears to be, about empirical evidence that proves that paintball makes people kill each other. There is no such evidence. There never was, and I never claimed that there was. I think that Mr Humphries's arguments were a total furphy from that point of view. What I am talking about is the whole nature of our community, our society. I want to see a community and a society that is not brutalised by the casual and popular pursuit of a range of violent activities, including paintball.

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