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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 12 Hansard (19 November) . . Page.. 4299 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

neighbour's children and our nephews and nieces. It is almost as if this is us and them, that our children and our families are above all this sort of behaviour. They are not. When we are talking about banning the sale of a product to people under the age of 18, we are talking about our children, our neighbours, our grandchildren and our nephews and nieces. You should put this sort of discussion in that context. We are talking here about creating the sort of community of which we want to be a part, of which we want to be proud and in which we want to bring up our children. You do not achieve that through this sort of legislation.

It is very simple and it is very easy. It is actually harder to stand up and oppose this than it is to stand up and propose it. To stand up and oppose it really does require you to address some of those underlying causes of antisocial behaviour. Rather than just debating the undesirability of absolute liability offences, and the reasons that the law that Mr Cornwell proposes is wrong as a matter of strict criminal justice practice and process, we should debate this propensity of the Liberal Party to seek to nail down and screw down all of those that they see as law breakers. Of course, here we just target young people: "Young people are off behaving in this vandalistic way. Just ban the substance."In relation to-

Mr Pratt: What do residents think, Jon?

Mr Stefaniak: You are just like your comrades in New South Wales and South Australia.

MR SPEAKER: Order, members! The Chief Minister has the floor and there are too many conversations going on in the gallery. You do not escape, members, by going to the gallery.

MR STANHOPE: It is simplistic and it is populist and the history of the world tells you that banning things does not work. We banned the sale of cigarettes to children donkeys years ago. I do not think the banning of the sale of cigarettes to people under the age of 16 has had any impact on the propensity of children to smoke. I do not think the banning of the sale of cigarettes to children under the age of 16 has had any impact on the availability of cigarettes or on the capacity of children to access cigarettes.

Mr Pratt: Yes, it has. It has slowed down.

MR STANHOPE: Mr Pratt says it has slowed down the availability of these illegal substances. That is a load of garbage. If people in this place think that any child who wants to smoke cannot access cigarettes, they are living in a little vacuum, completely divorced from the reality of the life.

Mr Pratt: You are on cloud nine, Jon.

MR STANHOPE: I am on cloud nine? I have had four children. I have brought them up and managed to get them through their teenage years. I have managed to get them all past the age of 18 and they are all leading reasonably stable lives and are reasonably well adjusted. They laugh with me, now that they are adults, about how they accessed alcohol when they were 14, 15 and 16, and how they accessed cigarettes and did similar things, things that I was perhaps suspicious of, but innocently unaware of at the time. Of course,

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