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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (26 June) . . Page.. 2204 ..

Mr Osborne: Not when you needed the numbers. You needed the numbers to get the surveillance cameras through.

MR HUMPHRIES: I do not know what you mean by "when you needed the numbers", but let me say - - -

Mr Osborne: Eight beats nine every time, Gary.

MR HUMPHRIES: Eight beats nine, does it? That is a very interesting set of numbers. I do not think Mr Osborne should ever aim to be Treasurer in an Independent government. Mr Speaker, let me say to him and to other members of this place that our view is that it is nonsense to suggest that we are showing contempt for the Assembly by supporting, as I said, only 13 out of 15 - in fact, it is nine out of 11 - recommendations of the Assembly committee. The other recommendations impose quite onerous obligations on the Government to proceed with a trial. The Government has accepted every one of those recommendations. Few, if any, of those burdens fall on any other municipal body or State government that administers security cameras in this country.

Mr Moore: But we are different because we have both functions.

MR HUMPHRIES: Okay. Very few impose standards of that kind on a city council, a municipal government or a State government, or a combination of those. Those obligations have not been imposed anywhere. In accepting nine of the 11 recommendations, the Government has very substantially accepted the burden placed on its shoulders by the Assembly. However, we have baulked at the suggestion that there should be expenditure of what I am told is something like $100,000 to employ a privacy ombudsman and implement complex legislation on privacy for the purposes of what may be only a three-, four- or five-month trial.

I ask members to consider what they are asking us to do. They want us to spend that amount of money on putting in place mechanisms which may never be of any long-term use to the Territory. They may be dumped at the end of the period of the trial.

Mr Moore: The privacy legislation is long term.

MR HUMPHRIES: The privacy legislation would presumably have a sunset clause in it, because the trial itself has a sunset clause.

Mr Moore: No, it should be broad privacy legislation and just have a bit to do with this.

MR HUMPHRIES: Okay; we are going to have broad privacy legislation. I make the point very clearly that privacy legislation is a very complex matter. It took years to develop at the Commonwealth level. The ACT still has not developed privacy legislation, because it has relied on the Commonwealth legislation. Right or wrong, that is what has happened. To now have to go through the exercise of developing privacy legislation would be a cost to the community, a cost to the taxpayer, and would result in considerable delay in the implementation of this kind of protective concept - a delay of several months, if not several years.

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