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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 9 Hansard (4 September) . . Page.. 3003 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

your licence back. That is no deterrent at all. The statistics show that last year, of almost 1,200 people who lost their licences, over one in three applied for a special licence and all but nine of those people got it. So here we have a law. The police arrest people for reckless, drunken or other driving, such as culpable driving. They go through the process of bringing them before the courts. The magistrate hears the charge, finds the person guilty, and inflicts a penalty of suspension of their licence. They walk out the front door, walk around to the back door, put in an application for a special licence and walk out the front door with a special licence. Where is the deterrence in that?

Mr Whitecross: Who gives them that, the magistrate? The magistrate gives it to them - the same person who gave them the penalty in the first place.

MR KAINE: It is probably the same magistrate who took his licence away from him 10 minutes before. The point is, Mr Speaker, that we have introduced this legislation because the Chief Magistrate has sought more specific guidance.

Mr Moore: And he will get it.

MR KAINE: The trouble is that I do not think he will. Anyway, Mr Speaker, in closing the debate, I merely wanted to reiterate for the record what the Government's intention is.

To take up a point that Ms Horodny made, this is not simply an isolated piece of legislation that the Government has introduced. It is part of a program of things that the Government is doing to bring home to people the problems of reckless and culpable driving and to make sure that they understand what their responsibilities are and that, at the end of the day, they themselves as drivers are fit to be out on the roads and that their vehicles are also. We will come to some other aspects of that later on this evening.

Mr Speaker, I recognise that people, by and large, accept the principle of what the Bills are about. They do not seem to have any trouble with that and I appreciate that. We will, of course, be debating some of the particular issues inherent in these two Bills when we move to the detail stage in a few minutes' time.

Question resolved in the affirmative.

Bill agreed to in principle.

Bill, by leave, taken as a whole

MR MOORE (9.02): Mr Speaker, I seek leave to move together all the amendments circulated in my name to the Motor Traffic (Alcohol and Drugs) (Amendment) Bill 1997.

Leave granted.

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