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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 3 Hansard (10 April) . . Page.. 911 ..

MS HORODNY (continuing):

It needs to be stressed that the accreditation process the Government is introducing is a voluntary participation scheme. To be accredited, all you need to do is undertake a two-week course. Other instructors will be able to continue on in their haphazard and unregulated state. Unfortunately, in many cases the public will not be aware of the fundamental differences. Why not make it compulsory for the whole industry to undergo training and come under some regulatory process to weed out the shonky operators? How many sporting coaches are allowed to train teams and individuals and then sit on judging panels when those people compete? It is the same principle. The separation of instructor from tester must be maintained.

MR KAINE (Minister for Urban Services) (4.38): The Government does not support the amendments put forward by Ms Horodny. I think the arguments that she has just spent a lot of time expounding do not relate to the facts that will exist once this Act is in place. In fact, most of what she has just read into the record at great length is comment by an anonymous person, a copy of which was faxed to me. If the person is not prepared to identify themselves in putting that sort of argument forward, then as far as I am concerned it does not carry very much value at all. Most of the points made `in any case' are easily refuted.

Mr Speaker, the principal reason why the Government does not accept the amendments put forward by Ms Horodny is that to accept the argument that all applicants for licences must be tested by a public servant means that the thrust of the competency testing would be totally negated. Bear in mind that there are options here. You can still go through the present system if you want to - front up and take a drivers test after being taught by your mother or your father or your brother or your sister - or you can take the option of the competency-based approach where you go through, with a licensed and accredited driving instructor, a course where the instructor has to certify, in 22 different areas of driver competency, that you have reached the desired skill level. Once you have done that you get your provisional licence. They are options; you can do one or the other. We are trying to encourage people to take the new option that we are offering, because we believe that, at the end of that kind of comprehensive instruction, a driver may come out with a better attitude to driving than do our current drivers who have been taught by relatives or whoever was available to teach them to drive.

Anybody who drives on our roads at the moment knows that there are an awful lot of people out there with a bad attitude to driving on public streets. Their performance on the roads is appalling. One would think that they knew nothing about the road rules, nothing about road courtesy, and nothing about commonsense in driving on our roads. We are trying to introduce a system which will lead to a better outcome.

If you are going to require, as the Greens are proposing, that, whether you take this new approach or not, you still have to sit for a driving test, under the same conditions that you do now, why would anybody go through the competency system? There is simply no incentive for them to do it. It simply negates the whole thrust of the Bill. I think that the Greens seem to have lost the plot on this somewhere.

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