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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 4 Hansard (8 May) . . Page.. 1182 ..

Mr Berry: Not the old.

MS REILLY: I was just going to refer to them as GOMs who get nervous when they see young people grouped together in public places. With this antagonism and mistrust, it is not surprising that a number of young people in our community feel alienated from the mainstream. It is also not surprising that at times they exhibit certain behaviours and do things to wind up certain people. They get some very interesting responses at times.

I think our failure to encourage young people is almost criminal. So often as a community we fail to recognise the contribution that young people make. Most young people are active, contributing members of our community. They have jobs or they are looking for work. They are in training or undertaking education. They are playing sport, helping other young kids with sport, or getting together. There was an article in today's paper about young bands. They participate in other arts activities. They are members of political parties and other community groups. They are working together to help each other through organisations such as the Youth Coalition and AXYS and through the youth centres. If you look at the media it is often very hard to recognise the contribution which young people make. We also fail at times to recognise and appreciate fully the enthusiasm they have for life and about not wanting to be stuck in a rut. They can look at things in a different way from us because we had a totally different upbringing and background. They bring forward fresh ideas and views of the world, and excitement that quite often we lose as we get a little older.

Other groups that we spoke to in a number of instances were older people, because one of the issues raised is safety for older people. The various groups who came and spoke to us raised the issue of safety. They talked about the problems and the associated costs and lack of independence that can come to older people if they fall, and fall in any circumstances. It can be extremely debilitating. They talked about the difficulties older people face in visiting local shopping centres if they are nervous about young people. They also added that they were impressed with the skill and expertise that these young people exhibited. They were not as antagonistic as we could have been led to believe. In fact, the committee received a letter from a woman of 87 who said how much she enjoyed watching these young people and how impressed she was with their skill.

There is one further matter that I would like to raise in relation to the evidence put before the committee, and that is the recognition in the Australian Magazine about Canberra as a skating destination. This gave another view of Canberra that I had never thought of - that people would come all this way just to skate. It seems that our wide open public spaces, which sometimes at the weekend have very few people in them, and our extensive cyclepath system provide opportunities for skating that you might not get in some other places. I think this is a view of Canberra which is not often spread into the rest of Australia. As we are all aware, through the failure of John Howard to live here, there is quite often a negative view of Canberra. This is a part of Canberra that some of us might not realise. It is one large skating park, Mr Speaker. I am surprised that ACT Tourism has not picked up this idea already and is not organising skating tours to Canberra.

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