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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 8 Hansard (9 August) . . Page.. 2779 ..

MR RUGENDYKE (continuing):

being more public servants, more teachers or more lawyers, but she derides the fact that there are ex-police officers here. Perhaps she would like to see the Eros Foundation grab a foothold here. That would be exciting, wouldn't it?

MR SPEAKER: Pardon me, Mr Rugendyke, did you say foothold?

MR RUGENDYKE: I did.

Ms Tucker: I would like some more nurses. I would like some more teachers. We have only one and he is going.

MR RUGENDYKE: But we cannot have more police officers; what a dreadful thing! While we have police officers here who are proud to support their police force, I will be one of them. I will be proud to support our police, to make their job more streamlined, and to help them clear up the crime rate, which they do so well. I will not be supporting Mr Stanhope. In fact, I might as well save everybody's time by saying that I have had a good look at the amendments and I will not be supporting those of Mr Stanhope or Ms Tucker.

MS TUCKER (10.50): That was a detailed argument! It looks as though I am talking to the omitting of the part and to what I am going to do if that is not done. We are having a cognate debate even though we do not know what the result of the proposed omitting of the part will be, although maybe we do. Mr Stanhope is attempting to omit the part which is a so-called improvement to the move-on powers. We will be supporting the omitting of the part. We opposed the reintroduction of the move-on powers in 1998. It seemed clear to us then that the police had sufficient powers at the time to perform their duties and that the move-on powers were more about ownership and control of public space than they were about the prevention of violence.

We do not have time to go into it tonight, but I wish we would have a debate in this place about the whole question of the social exclusion and marginalisation of people in our community, because they are at the heart of the concerns about move-on powers. If you look at the history of people clearing streets, you will see that it has always been a class thing. It started off as a class thing when shops were first introduced after the Industrial Revolution. A thing called shopping started and certain people did not like the peasants, the working class, being on the streets. They used to use the streets to play football, to congregate and to talk to each other. There was this emergence of a middle class and they started shopping. Then certain people started saying, "We do not want the working class to mess up the streets."

What we are seeing happening with move-on powers, if we look at any analysis of them, is that they do have a particular effect on certain groups or classes of people in our community. That is why people from the Labor Party and the Greens are concerned about the social implications. We are not seeing any analysis being done of that. Mr Stefaniak regards as ridiculous the amendments of mine which will follow if the opposition to this measure is not successful. What we are trying to do is to understand who this measure is impacting upon.

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