Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 6 Hansard (17 June) . . Page.. 1619 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

We believe that that is all the more reason for having a summary in The 1997-98 Budget at a Glance, so that the Canberra community and the committee can be assured that some significant efforts are being made. It is very much in tune with that whole-of-government policy initiative and progress type of performance indicator. It is again an area of extreme importance and one in which, I must say, most governments from the beginning of self-government have done a great deal towards improving ACT effort. Despite a lot of criticism from some of our fellow travellers, I do actually think that we are moving a long way, and it is a pity that those indicators are not there to better present the type of record that is there to be admired.

In relation to recommendation 6, there was a difference of opinion between the Minister and the committee. The Minister suggested that the work that is currently being done in terms of domestic violence is, in fact, being done by the person who was appointed through VOCAL. The committee has no quarrel with that. We commend that work. But it was quite clear that the Community Law Reform Committee Report No. 9 did recommend that a domestic violence project coordinator position be created, funded and put into place as soon as possible. The Minister responded by saying that there was an overview committee looking at the implementation of all the recommendations and that he wanted to wait until it had done its work. On balance, the committee thought that perhaps this area was too important to wait for that level of consideration, and it is recommending, as a matter of urgency, that the Government get on and appoint this domestic violence project coordinator. There is one issue in society which troubles everyone who is in any way a party to or knowledgeable about what is going on in the domestic violence area. The committee, plus I think every member of the community, would sincerely like every effort to be made to reduce the incidence of domestic violence and violence in general in the community.

The area of the Commonwealth privacy laws is not a new area. It has been debated in this Assembly. It has been debated in the public. It has been debated in many a forum. It is an area of great concern, again, to a great number of members of the community as well as to members of the Assembly. The absence of privacy laws - they will soon be removed by the Commonwealth - means that the private sector is not bound in the same way as the public sector is. This was an area of concern to the Estimates Committee, and I think it should be an area of grave concern to the Government. We look forward to an early response to this recommendation, to see just what steps are being taken to protect people's personal information from abuse in the private sector.

More than anything else, I think the absence of good environmental coordination of the information available led us to recommend that an appropriate performance measure of the environmental impact of tourism events be put in place. We were assured - and the committee had no reason to worry about this - that, for each event that happens in the ACT, very great care is taken of the environmental impact, the monitoring of that and the protection of the environment. However, the budget papers were not sufficiently clear on this. The committee felt that it was important to put that information on the table, to make the information absolutely clear, so that we could not get into the sorts of squabbles that we have seen recently about mountain bike events, about whether Mount Majura was or was not adequately protected, and so on.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .