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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 5027 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

The question that everyone has to ask themselves is: Do we need more data? The answer is yes. We do need more data on outcomes. Are we going to cause any harm to anybody if we go down this path? There is no harm to anybody. I come back to the initial point. Those opposite have argued this week, certainly in this sitting period, that it would be worth spending $14m if there was a chance of saving one life, but today they are not willing to do this very small thing that will cost nobody anything but will get more data and potentially save a life.

MR WHITECROSS: If no-one else is going to seek leave to speak, then I seek leave to speak again to respond to some of the remarks that have been made.

Leave granted.

MR WHITECROSS: Mr Speaker, given the length of this debate, I will try very hard to be brief. The Chief Minister demonstrated by her comments in this debate that she is more interested in playing politics than she is in engaging in the issue. She spent most of her speech peddling a fiction about the Labor Party's policy on vehicle testing. We do not need to get into the vehicle testing debate now. I am sorry that Mrs Carnell wasted so much time on it. Mrs Carnell said that the Labor Party were proposing to spend $14m on its vehicle testing policy. That is simply not true.

Mrs Carnell also said that only 2 per cent of accidents are attributable to vehicle defects. It is now down from 5 per cent to 2 per cent. Every time we hear the Government speak, the number of accidents caused by vehicle defects seems to have fallen. The point is that this has nothing to do with vehicle defects; so Mrs Carnell's entire speech was a waste. It was a political attack to try to discredit the Labor Party instead of addressing the issue that we raised.

Mr Osborne did the same thing. He tried to smear the Labor Party and me in particular by saying that we are anti-police. Of course we are not anti-police. Mr Osborne, the fact that we think for ourselves rather than unthinkingly promoting police policy does not mean that we are anti-police. I get on very well with a whole range of police officers. I listen to them and learn from them. That does not mean that I subscribe to the proposition that doubling the penalties for any range of offences will improve the law and order situation. I do not believe that. Mr Osborne is quite right to bring home with his comments some of the discomfort felt by police officers and some of the tragedy experienced by the community as a result of road trauma. I think it is a very hard job, Mr Osborne, to be a police officer and to have to turn up on someone's doorstep and tell them that someone they care about has been injured or has died. I know that that is hard, but that does not take away one little bit from the issue that we are debating today, Mr Osborne.

This is not about whether a motor accident is a serious event. It is not about vehicle testing laws. This is about whether we are going to have a rule of law which is consistent. That is what is missing from the subordinate law which we are proposing to disallow. It does not provide for a consistency in the rule of law. It provides for arbitrary changes to the rule of law according to the whim of the Minister. Voting for this motion does not have to send a negative message to anybody unless people choose to go out of this place and promote the suggestion - the lie, in fact - that anybody in this place does not take

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