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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 09 Hansard (Thursday, 19 August 2004) . . Page.. 3949 ..

from public areas would in fact be a strong preventative measure in mitigating juvenile crime and just general rotten behaviour.

Mr Speaker, I believe that the development of the site at Majura for a motor sport facility may contribute to the reduction of juvenile crime in the ACT, as a development anywhere else would. Youth as young as 12 years of age are currently reported to be involved in stealing, joy riding, and vandalising vehicles in Canberra. You certainly don’t need to be a licensed teenager to enjoy a motor sport facility. If you’re a 12 or a 13-year-old and you’re already showing a penchant for cars—hot cars and car-related activities and you don’t even own a car—you can still travel to somewhere like the dragway, participate with your older brothers or your older mates in those sorts of activities. Perhaps there’s an important release for some of our junior teenagers who tend to be doing quite illegal things in suburbia.

Mr Speaker, through a number of media releases, I’ve called on the government to look at ways to ramp up crime prevention programs. The community should work together to protect our kids. A motor sport facility for the people of Canberra would provide youths with an alternative to hanging around the streets and at the local shops and would give them a place to spend their time with a range of people who are also interested in motor sport.

We know that motor sport and the love of cars rate very highly among Canberra’s young; hence the significant amount of activity around the city on Friday and Saturday nights. These young people love to promenade in a different way; they love to show off their cars visually and through ear-splitting demonstrations of engine power and engine noise. I’m no petrol head, Mr Speaker, but I must say I do marvel at the incredible jobs that a lot of these kids and our young adults do on their very impressive looking cars.

Mr Speaker, the facility of a dragway and its associated motor sport and track facilities would give our youth of Canberra a safe and a suitable place to spend their time. This is what the opposition is proposing; this is our plan. By providing facilities available to youth for casual meets and socialising, the annoying presence of youth in Braddon on Friday and Saturday nights, for example, may reduce, with the facility giving them a place to go to as a group of motor sport enthusiasts.

This means that not only would the development of a motor sport facility in Majura provide an alternative for youths who may otherwise be out on the streets making trouble and breaking the law; it would provide an appropriate place for motor sport enthusiasts to gather instead of around the streets and down in some of the more remote suburbs undertaking burnout activities. It would be a central place to gather that would be supervised by professional and experienced staff and, I would suggest, would be frequently visited and constantly monitored by the police. This would give an opportunity for engagement—proactive engagement as opposed to traditional policing. This would encourage police and community interaction and would ensure that the facility itself was a safe place for parents to send their kids and for the community in general to visit.

Mr Speaker, I use the example of the Wakefield motor sport facility at Goulburn. Apparently, for a fee, groups of youth can spend the day at the track driving their cars into the ground and burning their tyres to the rims if that’s what they want to do. They

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