Page 3123 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 17 October 2006
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From a legal point of view, there is also some controversy with compliance testing. By using young people to purchase cigarettes to test compliance, you are actually creating a crime that would not otherwise exist. Worse than that: this crime involves children. While this is not entrapment and there is legal precedent, this issue is not resolved. The overall view of the law society, for example, in discussion with my office, was that a process that artificially creates a crime that might not otherwise have taken place is either a silly idea or an abuse of process.
Finally, I would like to talk about young people. This bill is about young people. Young people are busy. They have to balance their studies, their home lives, their sports, their jobs and any other activities with their social commitments. I think they deserve to be reimbursed for their time, especially when undertaking an activity such as compliance testing, which has the potential to impact on their safety and wellbeing. We were told that there might be some movie tickets or something like that as a reward for participating in this, but I do not believe that that can be considered as payment. If this bill utilised the services of adults instead of young people, there might be more discussion about remuneration. It concerns me that, as far as I have been informed, not one young person was consulted in the development of this amendment.
I am sure that health officers will be able to find volunteers. There are so many young people out there who will give their time if they feel that they are doing a service for society. There are many young people who stand opposed to cigarette smoking and are horrified when they see their friends going to the corner of the playground where the cigarette smokers hang out. So I do not think getting young people involved will be a problem. But, even if they are willing to give their time, that does not mean that they do not deserve to be reimbursed for it; nor does it mean that a majority of young people would not want to be remunerated. The problem really is that they were not asked. If this bill had been developed properly in consultation with those it principally concerns, perhaps my response would be different on this issue.
This is a government that over recent years has become more and more convinced that it knows the right course of action. From the 2020 plan to reorganise schools and close a large number of them, to the shift away from neighbourhood planning or local planning committees, to the blunt destruction of a large slab of community housing and supported accommodation services in the ACT, the notion of partnership with members of communities affected by their decisions or with community-based service organisations seems to have been discarded.
I finish by making it perfectly clear that I do want to reduce the harm that smoking has on young people and I do believe in creating adherence to the law. But there are too many potential problems with the practice of compliance testing as it has been proposed in this legislation, and without any consultation having been attempted with young people—by that I mean a broad spectrum of young people—or with organisations that are set up to advocate for young people, for me to feel comfortable supporting this bill as it stands at the moment. I do note that in some states where tobacco compliance testing is in practice the young people involved are 18 and over, although, obviously, they would need to look younger. I think that provision would prevent some of my concerns about the use of children as proposed in this legislation.
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