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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 8 Hansard (31 August) . . Page.. 2740 ..

MR SPEAKER: Mr Corbell, you will not get a chance to ask your question very shortly if you continue to interject.

MR SMYTH: That shows, Mr Speaker, that by far the arterials cause us more grief as a society, quite literally. When we look at the two types of residential streets, in both years the majority of injuries and fatalities occurred on the main residential streets where the speed limit would not be changed under Labor's proposal. In 1998 there were more than 50 casualties extra on those streets.

So it begs the question, Mr Speaker, and it is a very important and disturbing question: why is it that Labor only seems to support road safety measures on the roads that have the least road trauma? Why do they support measures to slow down cars on local streets but not on main residential or arterial roads? The figures show us where the problems lie and where we need to target our resources most, and that is what this government is doing, Mr Speaker. Arterial roads and the main residential streets account for almost 85 per cent of Canberrans hurt or injured in car accidents on our roads over the past two years, but Mr Hargreaves and the Labor Party will only support something which he says will have an impact on one in six of these casualties.

Mr Speaker, the speed camera program targets arterial roads and main residential streets. Yes, two weeks ago, due to the programs demonstrated success of slowing down motorists, the number of cameras was doubled and the number of streets significantly increased to include main residential streets. When we are developing road safety strategies it is vital that we do so based on scientific data, not emotion or political opportunism. The question of whether 50 kilometres an hour zones are a worthwhile road safety measure needs to be based on the same rigorous scientific assessment as was applied to the speed cameras. So, through you, Mr Speaker, to Mr Hargreaves: it is simply not good enough, when you are trying to improve people's lives and wellbeing through road safety measures, to guess, because, as you have shown so adequately, when you guess you can be wrong.

MR SPEAKER: Do you have a supplementary question?

Mr Hird: No, I will not ask a supplementary question. The answer was pretty detailed.

MR CORBELL: My question is to the Treasurer. Treasurer, yesterday, in an answer to a question I asked in relation to documents you had failed to supply to the Estimates Committee relating to ovals redevelopment, you said, and I quote, "However, as I understand it, they were not documents which were at the time of their creation written documents, or rather documents on paper, because they were emails between various parts of the ACT government." They are the same sort of thing really. Will the minister explain to the Assembly the precedent he has just established in determining whether an email is a document for the purposes of an Assembly committee's deliberations, and what is his explanation for the written document I tabled yesterday which he also failed to supply to the Estimates Committee?

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