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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 13 Hansard (26 November) . . Page.. 4777 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

It is not relevant to the debate, it is not funny, and they are wrong. Mr Cornwell tonight incorrectly assumed that no-one from this part of the house, the crossbench, had been victims of crime. He is wrong. I have been a victim of very serious crime. It has nothing to do with it, though. It has nothing to do with the position I take. My policy is not determined by my personal experiences.

Lightening up a bit, I do not like chardonnay. If I want to drink anything, I will drink a whisky, and I don't do that very often. Maybe Mr Cornwell needs to do it less-or whatever it is he likes to drink.

Thirdly, Mrs Dunne came down the other night especially to mock Ms Dundas and myself because of our embracing of the youth culture, as if this was somehow an affectation. There were comments made about hip-hop. I actually found that interesting too, because Mrs Dunne has never talked to me about hip-hop. She has never asked me if I like hip-hop.

Mrs Dunne: Do you?

MS TUCKER: I do actually. And a lot of hip-hop happens in my house because two members of my family compose it. And I want to respond to that, not because I have a connection with it-I would not claim to be the key expert on hip-hop, but I do live with it, and I like some of it-but because I just wanted to talk up hip-hop actually, because I know in Australia it is a very interesting culture.

Just for the record, I want to talk about it a little bit, because if you look at hip-hop, in America particularly, you will see that it is often portrayed as a very negative culture, and there are some MCs who just rap about violence, money and girls. But, let's face it, it is pretty hard to get away from those three things anyway. But a lot of American hip-hop artists, other than those making up gangster identities for themselves to sell on the mainstream charts, are telling real stories about the social inequities in contemporary society, particularly for black Americans. Hip-hop is a voice that is used to express opinions about all sorts of things, and there are lots of rappers who use it in a really positive way.

Australian hip-hop has developed a style of its own. It started from the American culture, but there are now a lot of Australian groups who are proud to be rapping, in an Australian accent, about real issues. Some Australian hip-hop groups are the Hilltop Hoods, the Herd, 12,000 Techniques, TZU, Sister She, Combat Wombat and Curse of Dialect. And there is another American group who are doing really well at the moment, the Black Eyed Peas. Their song "Where is the Love"has been No 1 on the mainstream charts for weeks, and it is a song about peace and global compassion. So I think, let's hear it for hip-hop.

Ramadan

Australia Day in the National Capital Inc

MR PRATT (11.06): Mr Speaker, I do not quite know what Ms Tucker was aiming at there. I certainly would agree that we do not need to have unnecessary barbs flying

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