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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 3 Hansard (8 March) . . Page.. 670 ..
MR STANHOPE (continuing):
likely to be criminals. I would have thought that those sorts of criminalogical assumptions had been abandoned a fair while ago. However, I take the point the Attorney was making. I think they were theories propounded in the middle of last century by a noted Italian criminologist who believed that, by feeling the skulls of infants at birth, you could automatically determine whether or not they would become criminals by the shape of the forehead and the number of bumps on the head.
These are worrying suggestions. I think we need to be very careful when we talk about a person's genetic make-up being responsible for their behaviour. It is the sort of assertion that could lead us anywhere. It is potentially very dangerous and should be distinguished very much from approaches to the position of mentally ill people and the responses of the criminal justice system to people who commit crimes because of a mental disability.
Bill, as a whole, agreed to.
Bill agreed to.
That this Bill be agreed to in principle.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
Bill agreed to in principle.
Leave granted to dispense with the detail stage.
Bill agreed to.
That this Bill be agreed to in principle.
MR CORBELL (11.51): Mr Speaker, the Labor Party will be supporting this Bill today. We believe that the Bill is a positive and useful step towards ensuring that government agencies and other statutory authorities are accountable to the community and, indeed, to this Assembly when it comes to the provision of information in relation to the impact of their actions and the steps they take to ensure ecologically sustainable development. Mr Speaker, the principles of ecologically sustainable development are well established and they do highlight the importance of governments taking positive action to ensure not only that our environment is protected but also that it is managed and operated by our society in a way which is sustainable in the long term.
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