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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Tuesday, 10 February 2004) . . Page.. 157 ..

eight. I think we have had that since about the 19th century. More recently, the age has been increased to 10 and, of course, a person between 10 and 14 has to have criminal intent to be prosecuted.

This is hardly the most heinous crime of the century; it is more of a misdemeanour. One penalty unit, $100; you do not get any lower than that and I have not seen part-penalty units. However, the effect of this in our public baths has served us well. Yes, there are a number of gymnasiums and private pools around and, in most of those, unless they are very small and have a unisex toilet or something like that, invariably they have a male change room and a female change room.

Owing to advances in sport and recreation facilities over the years, most change rooms these days are a lot more private than they were in the past, but that is not necessarily so with our public baths. If you go into the Civic change rooms, they are open and, similarly, those at the Manuka swimming pool and other public baths are open. People of the same sex have changed there and been protected by what I think is some very sensible legislation—and I think many of the public think so, too—for many, many years.

People have some real concerns about adverse effects if this legislation is changed and if the government is successful in getting rid of these particular protections, sections 18 and 30, which have served the test of time. It is all very well for the attorney to say, “Yes, but if people do the wrong thing it is offensive behaviour and they can be prosecuted,” but there are a lot of things that occur with regard to which you could not mount a prosecution, which I think people would simply find problematic. Women, for example, might be changing, say, at the Manuka pool or Civic in their change room and, if this is successful, men could go in there to change, because there is absolutely no sanction.

That might offend modesty, it might offend the personal space of the women who are changing and it might make them feel uncomfortable. The men might be doing absolutely nothing wrong, just getting changed there, but would make the women there—and there might be women with small children—feel uncomfortable. A number of women have said to me that they would feel very, very uncomfortable in that situation. That is not to impute any improper motives or anything like that necessarily, on persons coming in.

Of course, there is the potential too for a little bit of mischief as well, such as perhaps teenage boys getting in and annoying the teenage girls. There are also concerns that people would have about paedophiles, concerns about people maybe taking pictures with digital cameras and all those sorts of matters for which yes, there are offences with which you can charge the perpetrators. However, Chief Minister, that never stopped you bringing in additional offences before when you felt the need arose.

We had an example recently, in the act we have just done, of a situation like that. Here you are saying, “No, there are adequate offences. We do not need this. Let’s get rid of it.” You could say the same thing about this: “We do not really need racial vilification, we do not need sexual vilification, because no-one has ever been prosecuted for that.” Yet, you are hardly likely to say we will scrub that from the statute book, even though there are ample offences under the Crimes Act which would deal with that type of

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