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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (30 March) . . Page.. 1114 ..
MR BERRY (continuing):
not have central locking and have to lock each door separately and do not have electric windows and have to crank up each window, which invites people not to observe the law. In fact, many will not and it will mean that poorer people will be discriminated against.
There are some other ludicrous aspects of this law that demonstrate that it has been drawn up by people who do not have their minds on the job. First of all, it does not say that you have to wind up the windows. You have to lock the doors, but you do not have to wind up the windows. What a joke that is! You can leave the sun roof open. You have to lock the doors, but you can leave the sun roof open. What happens if you are the more showy type and drive a car in which you can show yourself off to the population as you go by, so you have a cabriolet, as they are now called - a little convertible? If you go to a service station or you pull up on the side of the road, you can lock the doors and leave the windows and the hood down. These sorts of laws are really a joke.
We are talking about turning the engine off and taking the keys away so that children cannot drive off in the car. My experience of these things is that children who are not well behaved can be as hazardous in a car without the keys in it as they can let off the handbrake and knock it out of gear and it will roll away. This is just nonsense. This law is badly thought through; it is nanny-state legislation. Someone in the bureaucracy somewhere has a pet hate and they want to cover it with a law. Perhaps it is because at some point in time one of their kids turned the engine on and they have been angry about it or they have been stupid enough to leave their car unlocked in a place where thieves abound and something has been pinched. This rule is a joke.
The rule goes on to say that if you are going to pay for a parking voucher you can ignore all these things. If you happen to be where there is one of those voucher machines and you have to walk 50 metres to get to it, you can go right off the radar as far as your car is concerned and leave it there wide open for thieves. The whole thing has been poorly thought through and deserves to be knocked flat. I am sure that somebody will say that locking the car means winding up the windows, but the rule does not say that and it does not say a damn thing about leaving the hood down. Those in this Assembly who fancy a car with a rag top so that they can show themselves off to the voters should be aware when they go to get petrol that they must lock the doors, but can leave the windows and hood down. They can be just as showy and will not have to worry about the other things, but all of their possessions inside the car are going to be just as vulnerable to thieves. If you happen to have any kiddies in the car, they can still let the handbrake off and knock it out of gear so that it runs into the service station fence. This rule is just nonsense, nanny-state law, and it deserves to be repealed.
MR SMYTH
(Minister for Urban Services) (12.06): Mr Speaker, the opening statement by Mr Hargreaves that changes are being made on the run does the whole process of coming to national road rules some discredit. It is not a case of legislation being made on the run. It took 50 years to get to a position of national consistency and decide that we would all drive in this country in the same manner; yet, less than a month after the introduction of the proposal in the ACT, we have local Labor yet again out of step with the rest of the country. Mr Speaker, it is not a matter of change being made on the run because when the legislation was implemented across the country the national maintenance committee was established to look at changes as they came forward. It was
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