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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (3 December) . . Page.. 4495 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

Why not make it 40 kilometres an hour or 30 kilometres an hour? Reducing from 60 kilometres an hour to 50 kilometres an hour does not make a large difference to travel times, but it does make a large difference to death and injury. That is why you will get all the committees, the large and important motoring organisations and anyone else who has looked at this issue recommending a 10 kilometres an hour drop in the speed limit.

We have also been told that most people drive at slower than 60 kilometres an hour in residential areas. Obviously, all of them do not. It is about changing driver behaviour. I also heard it said in the debate that there is a problem anyway because people, on average, drive at 10 kilometres an hour higher than the speed limit. Logically, it would seem useful, then, to reduce the speed limit. If that is a part of driver behaviour, then it would be useful to reduce those speeding drivers another 10 kilometres an hour as well.

In conclusion, I would just like to say that I accept that, obviously, Labor and Liberal are nervous about this issue. I do not think they need to be. I think we would be able very proudly to put in place legislation that would reduce the speed limit in our suburbs. I think it is not only a statement about our understanding of the difficulties and dangers that have resulted from how fast people drive around our city, but also an acknowledgment that we want our city to be livable, that we want people in the suburbs to feel that the road is not totally dominated very dangerously by speeding vehicles, and that children, pets, older people and the rest of the neighbourhood can exist more in harmony with the road.

If we want to develop local communities, it is very interesting to look at the research - and it has been done - which shows a social interaction between people relative to their proximity to a road and how major that road is and how fast or great traffic on that road is. There is a clear relationship between social mobility and social interaction and the level of use of the roads. There is a strong and well-documented argument there as well for community development to make our roads a little less hostile than they are.

Question resolved in the negative.

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION (AMENDMENT) BILL 1997

Debate resumed from 24 September 1997, on motion by Mr Osborne:

That this Bill be agreed to in principle.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General) (7.30): Mr Speaker, I will be fairly succinct in my comments on this Bill. This Government made it clear early in its term of office, in fact, before that term began, that it believed that extensive reform of the operation of the Freedom of Information Act needed to occur. We did so because we had been subject to some fairly disgraceful behaviour on the part of the former Government when it came to accessing information of a fairly basic kind which we felt it was necessary to use

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