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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 5 (Hansard) 16 May) . . Page.. 1402 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

We especially need to socialise our young men and young women in healthy ways that help redefine power. If young men in particular are controlled by fear, through bullying, by violence - and that certainly has happened in schools, particularly in the sort of all-male schools where I was educated for most of my school life - then young boys in particular, young men, are going to have contempt for those who do not fear them and who cannot threaten them. Control is achieved through fear and one learns to control by fear. How many killings, I wonder, have occurred because someone felt powerless and disenfranchised, with no capacity to deal with this powerlessness except by adopting the tools of fear and violence? Unless young men and young women are taught to redefine their own power in different and constructive ways, violence will continue.

It is all there in the report of the National Committee on Violence. The statistics, meanwhile, keep increasing. Do we have to wait until this statistic is overwhelming before we take action, as we did in Port Arthur? I think not, and, having heard members speak twice today on such issues, I believe that there is genuine concern across this Assembly for dealing with the socialisation of the causes and with the causes of violence. No doubt we will continue to disagree about where to draw the line and we will continue to disagree, to a certain extent, about some of the specifics; but I think we should use this overwhelming situation of agreement to try to progress the issue further.

Again, I congratulate Mr Humphries and his State counterparts for taking such an appropriate, courageous and timely step in the right direction. I raise these issues because I see it as a healthy start, with a long way to go before we can say that we have minimised the harm to our very best potential in society.

MR WHITECROSS (Leader of the Opposition) (5.24): Mr Speaker, I also rise to applaud this legislation and the national approach that underpins it. It shows the success and the benefits of working together for national agreement. Often national approaches are criticised and there is a tendency to push for more parochial solutions to problems; but I think this legislation demonstrates the benefits of a national approach and, indeed, the benefits of bipartisanship. We are all familiar with the circumstances that have elevated our sights in relation to this matter.

This legislation is good news for the ACT in particular. It is good news because it involves a further strengthening of our own laws, but it is also good news because it involves other States introducing laws more in line with the laws that have always applied in the ACT, which have limited the availability of some of these semiautomatic weapons. The more widely these laws apply, the more effective they will be, and it is good news for the ACT that other States are now going to pass these kinds of laws, because that will affect the efficacy of our own laws.

Mr Speaker, a key ingredient of these laws is the issue of compensation. As Mr Stefaniak rightly said, when you change the rules, you have to be willing to compensate people who are affected by that change in the rules. You cannot have a situation where people can possess these weapons in a law-abiding way one minute and then ban them and expect those people to bear the full cost of that decision. I think it is a mature and sensible

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