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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Tuesday, 3 August 2004) . . Page.. 3368 ..

Specific to this legislation: the system of a voluntary code where 90 per cent of the junk mail is derived from whatever group it’s called—the Distribution Standards Board—seems to be working. I have a “No junk mail” sign on my letterbox. I have an argument with my wife as to whether or not it should stay there because, like Mrs Cross, she does not mind the junk mail. If I get to it first, it just goes in the bin. But I have never had a thing in it.

Mrs Cross: See, we like retail therapy.

MR WOOD: Well, it is damaging, I can tell you, to the hip-pocket nerve. The voluntary code seems to be working because we are not getting complaints about litter in letterboxes. You can go to any hardware store in this town and get a sign, as I have, and put it up. “No junk mail”. I find it very effective. It went up on my letterbox when I went away for a fortnight. I cancelled the mail and put that up and there was not a thing lying around anywhere. So it seems to work.

In respect to Ms Tucker’s proposed amendments, speaking ahead of time perhaps: the system seems to be working quite well. So why would you tie it down so definitively? I know the Greens like to do that—they do want to tie things down so rigidly—when I do not think, on the evidence, it is necessary. I do not think it is a problem. I do not know if I will repeat those comments when we get to discuss the amendments.

In the main, I am pleased with the words I hear in this Assembly today. Mr Cornwell raises the point, following the question he asked on notice, about penalties and the people who have been prosecuted. Yes, it is not a vast number of people. This legislation will make it a little easier to prosecute people; that is what it is about. Education always is the thing. What disappoints me is that there is more likely to be litter thrown in Canberra than in other cities in Australia, and I do not think that says much for a city that I thought was pretty good on those sorts of things. But let’s now get to the detail stage, Mr Speaker.

Question resolved in the affirmative.

Bill agreed to in principle.

Detail stage

Clauses 1 to 9, by leave, taken together and agreed to.

Clause 10.

MR WOOD (Minister for Disability, Housing and Community Services, Minister for Urban Services, Minister for Police and Emergency Services, Minister for Arts and Heritage, and Acting Minister for Health) (5.16): Mr Speaker I move amendment No 1 circulated in my name [see schedule 2 at page 3380] and table a supplementary explanatory statement to the four amendments that I will be moving.

The first of these amendments is proposed to clause 10 of the bill which deals with commercial waste. It inserts a new clause 10 (1) (a) to make it an offence for an occupier

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