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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 10 Hansard (30 August) . . Page.. 3733 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

Out big concern is not necessarily about the revenue base of the operators but about safety. The people who are properly licensed will have gone through the safety checks. So when your son or daughter hops into a car owned by a licensed operator to go to a formal, you will know that you can expect the same minimum standard of safety as you have with taxis and your own vehicle. If you hop into one of those other vehicles you have no guarantee about safety, you have got no guarantee that the right insurance has been taken out and you have got no idea of the insurance cover should there be an accident. So I am pleased to see that recommendation.

In the attack on the cowboys in this industry, I am pleased to see that all advertising of hire car services must include the licence and other permit numbers held by the advertiser. The only thing I would add to that recommendation, Mr Speaker, is that we need to look at enforcement. The government should pick up this unanimous recommendation and make it law. If you are going to advertise in the newspaper, if you are going to advertise in the Yellow Pages, you will have to indicate your licence number and the type of licence you hold. This recommendation will be meaningless if it is unable to be enforced. So the government of the day, whoever it is, needs to act on that particular recommendation.

Mr Speaker, as I said, most of the other recommendations are self-explanatory. Recommendation 13 is that the government provide sufficient resources to enable appropriate monitoring and enforcement. If there was one consistent theme from my discussions with the industry, it was that they are honest people plying an honest trade being adversely affected by cowboys, and there was not enough enforcement. When people in the industry provided photos of the system being abused, they were told, "Sorry, there is nothing we can do about it. We haven't got enough inspectors. We can't prove this, we can't prove that." If we are going to have any kind of regulatory regime at all, we have got to back it up. So I am pleased to see the unanimous encouragement for the government of the day to boost resources.

In summary, this is an excellent report. The people who brought the problem to us said, "Look, we won't interfere with the process. We want to have something fair and reasonable in our small part of the world." I am pleased to see that there was a unanimous approach to protecting people whose livelihood is at risk and saying, "We can improve the system without sending you to the wall in the process." I commend the chair and the secretary on this really good report.

I would like to see the government pick up the recommendations and run with them. The Labor Party will definitely be picking up recommendation 2 if we take office after 20 October. I make that commitment now because there has been uncertainty in the industry. People have been trying to sell their plates and get out of the industry but nobody wants to buy them because of the uncertainty.

We saw what happened with milk deregulation. I am not arguing the rights or the wrongs of milk deregulation, but the uncertainty caused by the passage of time frightened the heck out of everybody within and outside that industry. Mr Speaker, this is what has occurred within the hire car industry, so there is a need for certainty .

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