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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 11 Hansard (6 November) . . Page.. 3691 ..

MR WOOD (10.56): I seek leave to speak again.

Leave granted.

MR WOOD: Mr Humphries has just raised the question of a letter he wrote to me and, I think, to Mr Moore about the use of cameras in gathering evidence. It was probably fair enough of Mr Humphries to write to me. I certainly have received and am considering that letter. I would have thought that he might have sent it to the Legal Affairs Committee, because they were the group - - -

Mr Osborne: It would not have taken us 10 months to respond to it.

MR WOOD: What was that, Mr Osborne?

Mr Osborne: It would not have taken us 10 months to respond to his letter.

MR SPEAKER: Would you stop encouraging interjections, Mr Wood.

MR WOOD: I would have thought that an appropriate step to take would be to send that letter to the committee that made the report. That would seem to me to be the first thing that Mr Humphries should have done.

MR OSBORNE (10.57), in reply: Thank you, Mr Humphries, for finally answering that one question that has been bugging me about this report from the day we tabled it, in September last year - why it took you so long to respond to it. I think you just answered it, because you said you do not want to make an election issue out of it; but the reality is that you really do.

Mr Speaker, I think I am at one with the Government on the issue of surveillance cameras, but the reality has been, in the life of this Assembly, that we are outnumbered. We do not have enough numbers. That is why the Legal Affairs Committee went to the trouble of having a lengthy and very detailed inquiry, which your colleague Mr Kaine sat on and Ms Follett sat on. I think we all moved a lot. I have said a number of times in here that I think we all moved ground on the issue of surveillance cameras. I still see a lot of benefits from them, especially in Civic, and I would love to be able to put them up tomorrow; but, as you know, Minister, we do not have the numbers to do that. What we managed to achieve in the Legal Affairs Committee was a way for surveillance cameras to be put up, whether you like it or not.

Mr Humphries: It would cost $100,000 to do it, and I do not have $100,000.

MR OSBORNE: I think someone quoted me a figure of over 200 surveillance cameras in operation in Canberra already. The privacy legislation would have been worth considering. You complain, Minister, about the recommendations; but if you had come to the Legal Affairs Committee, even five months after we had tabled the report, and said to us, "These are the problems", we could have considered it again and perhaps changed

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