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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 8 Hansard (26 June) . . Page.. 2183 ..

Mr Whitecross: Yes. Yes, good.

MR DE DOMENICO: I see no nod but I am assuming he means yes, because he is smiling. I look forward to receiving the community's constructive response to the recommendations. This Government wishes to work in cooperation with all MLAs in order to achieve a high-quality Library Service for Canberra now and in the future. As I said earlier, I would urge the Opposition to see this as an issue above point-scoring, although quite frankly I will not hold my breath. I hope that all members of the Assembly are so interested in the future of the ACT Library Service that they will avail themselves of the opportunity and constructively contribute to the review.

MR WOOD (4.00): Madam Deputy Speaker, as we have seen before, residents of the ACT are passionate about their hospitals and their schools. We are now seeing that they are also passionate about their libraries. The excellent facilities offered by the ACT library centres have long been recognised by their high rate of usage. The Minister just said that it is the best library service in Australia. Young parents with preschoolers enjoy story times; primary school children on holiday attend craft and activity sessions; school students research essays and projects, as do tertiary students and students of the University of the Third Age; vision-impaired people borrow talking books; and many people of all ages borrow books just because of their love of reading. Books give pleasure. They inform and entertain. They expand our cultural horizons. I enter my local library with a feeling of expectation. I can borrow books, videos, compact discs and tapes. I can use the library database to search the whole ACT collection for books I want. I can access the Internet.

There have been claims that with the expansion of the Internet books will become redundant, but I am not convinced. Yes, the Internet does amaze me with the vastness of its resources and the speed of its access. While researching a simple topic, I found so much information that it was impossible to read it all. Whole chapters of relevant books were there, as well as articles, transcripts, court cases and speeches. As a research tool the Internet is superb, but nothing will replace a book. You cannot curl up on the couch on a rainy afternoon with a computer screen. You cannot read it in bed or in the bath. You can print the article, but it still does not have the ease of portability and the sheer readability of a book.

Therefore, I am worried by an absence in the USE Consultants report of reference to reading as a pleasure and an entertainment. The description of the core business of the ACT Library Service as including "book lending" does not convey the importance of the enjoyment of books. Yes, our libraries need to be able to offer us Internet access and access to all the other multimedia developments that are occurring in this technological age, but they must never lose sight of their central purpose - to encourage, to nurture and nourish a love of reading in the population they serve, to expand our cultural horizons. This report that we have been discussing today in this MPI has several faults. There are no terms of reference. There is no pagination, making it hard to discuss the points it raises. As a result, there is no effective index. The rationale used for arriving at such things as catchment figures is not detailed. Civic library supposedly has a catchment figure of 13,564, while having loans in 1994-95 of 239,616 and visits of 306,520.

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