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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 11 Hansard (25 September) . . Page.. 3363 ..

MR OSBORNE (continuing):

recommended by everyone and I think we have achieved that. We have covered lots of issues there and I am sure that both Rosemary and Trevor will mention them when they have their opportunity to speak. I would like to express special thanks to our secretary, Beth Irvin, who was also working on her first report. She certainly hounded the hell out of me and became a tremendous asset in the preparation of this report. Madam Deputy Speaker, I commend the report to the Assembly.

MR KAINE (12.30): I will be brief, in view of the lateness of the hour, but I have to say that I support this report. I found the inquiry a most interesting and informative one and the things that came out of it for me were threefold. The chairman has traversed all the content of the report and there is much in it, but there are three aspects of this business of surveillance cameras that were brought home to me during the inquiry.

The first is the question of justification for putting them in in the first place. Although these things have proliferated in Australia, forgetting the rest of the world, there appears to have been no research whatsoever done to determine whether they were necessary in the first place. Nor could we find any evidence that, having installed them, anything substantive was achieved by it. We were told that people feel safer and, when we asked the question, "How do you know that? What surveys have you done?", the reply was, "Oh, well, we just know". When we asked whether crime had reduced with the installation of these cameras we were told, "Yes, it did". When we asked whether we could have the statistics, there were none. So we have had a proliferation of surveillance cameras in all kinds of places throughout the length and breadth of Australia and there appears to have been no work done to determine whether or not they are cost effective. That is the first point.

The second point is the question of protocols as to their use. We were told in Brisbane that there were protocols that covered who could operate the surveillance cameras, who provided the monitoring, what could be done with the tapes, that the tapes were under strict controls and there was comprehensive auditing of a system, and so on. We did not sight any of those protocols. As the chairman has pointed out, in some instances it appears that the protocols are not as effective as some people might think they are, in terms of what happens to the tapes, for example.

The third point that came to me, and the most fundamental, was this question of privacy. There is an argument that those who are not doing anything wrong have nothing to fear, so they should not mind being under constant surveillance in a public place. I do not subscribe to that. Do you? Nor, incidentally, does the Australian Privacy Commissioner, and I think that his argument is a valid one. Because you are in a public place does not mean that everything that you do and say is susceptible under any circumstances to surveillance. If you are going about your business in a legitimate way, if you are going about your recreation in a legitimate way, I see no argument that says that because you are in a public place it is reasonable and proper that you be under surveillance, and that that is justified on some basis that if you are not doing anything wrong you have nothing to hide. There is much that one does in public places that is still private in nature. Whom one associates with is a matter of privacy. You ought not necessarily have people observing you constantly, seeing whom you meet, where you go and what you do.

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