Page 3589 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 25 August 2009
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Despite agreeing in the committee room to all seven recommendations and supporting the spirit of the bill, Mr Coe is now claiming in the Assembly that in fact he only supports six of the recommendations. Now he says the bill represents heavy-handed tactics. What we are witnessing here is Mr Coe’s lack of experience, his immaturity and his inability to have the courage of his convictions. Behind closed doors, in the midst of considered debate, Mr Coe agrees to a certain position, agrees with particular recommendations, but back under the fluorescent lights of the party room he finds that it is not enough for him to conscientiously exercise his role as a committee member and agree in his party room to the seven recommendations that he agreed to in the committee room. Suddenly he realises he has lost an opportunity to oppose for the sake of opposition.
His colleagues come down on him like a ton of bricks. His leader asks: “Alistair, what have you done? Agreed with the Labor Party on all seven recommendations? What have you done? Agreed? Agreed unanimously with the Labor Party? Go back, Mr Coe.” That is the plaintive cry from his leader: “Go back and oppose. Do your job. Oppose for the sake of opposition. That is what you are meant to be doing. Oppose for the sake of opposition.” And so he does.
He signs a report in which he agrees with the Labor member, Ms Porter, on all seven recommendations, walks into this place and suddenly agrees with only six. It is all there in the report. It is in black and white, in the committee report, “agrees to all recommendations”. He walks in here and says, “Heck, it’s not good enough to be seen to be agreeing with the Labor Party.”
Mr Hanson: No wonder Andrew is twitching over there.
MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ms Burch): Mr Hanson, please be quiet.
MR STANHOPE: Now of course he is also claiming that the bill makes it technically a crime for chalk hopscotch drawings to appear on paths and for small groups such as Scouts to paint stencilled numbers on guttering outside residential properties. That is not true and Mr Coe should not know that it is not true.
This was the Canberra Liberal Party’s first unexamined response to the bill. And despite the committee resources that Mr Coe has taken advantage of, despite being walked through his errors, despite being convinced behind closed doors that the government was right and that Mr Seselja was wrong, back in the party room under the hot lights he buckles.
As Mr Coe and other committee members know and as the government has been at pains to explain, technically speaking these activities are already illegal under the Crimes Act. And it is not practical to separate out these activities from other forms of graffiti through dedicated legislation.
Where they are filtered out is through the application of the de minimus rule, which is applied every day by every officer with a regulatory responsibility. The rule means that offences that are of a very minor or accepted nature will not be prosecuted in the
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