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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 8 Hansard (29 August) . . Page.. 2581 ..
MR MOORE (Minister for Health and Community Care) (5.13): This is specific legislation about Olympic venues only. It is not about anything else. Mr Stanhope spoke about authorised people and said that police officers were the appropriate people to take certain action. Mr Stanhope, at question time today, raised a concern about keeping police on the streets and stopping burglaries. Requiring police to conduct searches at Olympic venues will create a huge vacuum that sucks police over to those venues. I think it is appropriate for us to retain the notion of the authorised person so that we can keep our police officers on the streets. That is the most important thing. That comment applies to the last three amendments Mr Stanhope proposes to move.
My arguments on the amendment before us apply also to the next amendment Mr Stanhope will move, so I do not intend to stand up a second time. By introducing a requirement that a person must have reasonable grounds for believing that a person is carrying a prohibited item, you are eliminating the ability to have a broad search. If reliable information comes to hand that a particular group is planning a particular action, then officials have to have the power to do a fairly widespread search of people. As I read it, that would not require reasonable grounds for believing that a particular person was carrying a prohibited item, the limitation that Mr Stanhope seeks to put in the legislation.
With almost any other piece of legislation of this kind, I would be rushing to support Mr Stanhope's amendment. Mr Kaine reminded me of that in reading out what I had said about necessity. I am trying to remember the person I was quoting, whose name I gave at the time. It seems to me that we have the responsibility to provide a level of security that we would not provide anywhere else. We only have to think back to some of the appalling events associated with past Olympics. They have brought about loss of life of elite athletes and others. The ACT should not be seen as a weak link. As an Olympic venue, it will receive worldwide coverage. If something goes wrong here, there is no doubt that it will receive a huge amount of coverage.
We have to provide this kind of power for a very limited time for a specific purpose at a specific place. That is what this legislation does. We ought to resist this amendment.
MR RUGENDYKE (5.16): There is a large degree of confusion over this amendment and the next one Mr Stanhope proposes to move. I apologise for trying to bring a degree of commonsense to this debate, but let us ponder for a moment a scenario that will show the failure of these amendments. Let us assume a busload of people from the tattooed classes of Mr Osborne's electorate wish to come to the Olympic soccer and a fine upstanding citizen says, "I saw a bloke get on that bus with a bag full of flares." Once the bus arrived at the venue, who would be able to work out which person on the bus had the flares? If there was a need to have reasonable grounds for believing a person possessed a prohibited item, how would they determine whom to search? It might be the case that the whole busload needs to be searched or frisked. I will not be supporting these two amendments.
MR HUMPHRIES
(Treasurer, Attorney-General and Minister for Justice and Community Safety) (5.19): Let me come back to what I see as the nub of this debate. It is about whether it is possible to have searches conducted other than in circumstances where the police have a reasonable ground for believing that a person possesses a prohibited item. If we want to impose that condition, we have to be quite clear that we
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