Page 5291 - Week 14 - Thursday, 19 November 2009
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animals. The annual indiscriminate property damage caused by users of consumer fireworks also informed their decision that such items were not suitable for consumers.
Thirteen years after that, the Victorian government followed suit and implemented a ban on consumer fireworks. That was in 1985, 24 years ago. They announced that their ban was due to the untold injuries, death and distress caused by consumer fireworks. Now, as with other states, the use of fireworks is legal only under the control of a licensed pyrotechnician.
New South Wales joined the other states in 1987. They took their decision based on the extensive and serious injuries to people and animals, the death of animals, distress to animals and people and senseless property damage.
From that we can see that all of the issues that face this community have faced all of those other jurisdictions as well. They moved earlier than we have. Perhaps that is around our community’s own fondness for and connection to cracker weekend. As someone who was born in the ACT, I have been attending cracker night since probably 1971. I have enjoyed it. Even as late as this year, my children and I enjoyed the use of consumer fireworks.
But the time has come. The situation is that we are seeing repeated complaints from the community, senseless property damage, distress to animals and distress to people. It is being caused by the minority of people, but there is not a legal framework that we can implement that will address the issues around the illegal use of consumer fireworks. We have tried. If you reflect on the Hansard and go back to all the debates, you will see just how much effort—Mrs Dunne acknowledged this in her speech—has gone into ensuring that the legislation, the regulatory regime around the legal use of consumer fireworks, addresses the issues of community concern. But it has not worked. Complaints are rising every year. For the past two years, complaints to the Office of Regulatory Services have increased.
Let me look at some of the issues over the last long weekend. Seventeen people presented themselves to accident and emergency with injuries related to fireworks. The ACT Ambulance Service attended one incident relating to a firework injury. The Fire Brigade received four call-outs that appeared to be firework related. These included one grassfire, two bonfires which were outside the regulations and a fire set in a drain. There were three dogs killed, four dogs injured and 53 dogs reported as lost during this past fireworks season.
These are the issues that the government has had to look at and see how we respond to that antisocial behaviour occurring within our community under the guise of the legal use of fireworks. No-one is saying that the issues are caused through people abiding by the legislation. It is about people who are using the protection of the legislation to purchase consumer fireworks and then engage in illegal activity.
All of us have read the stories of property damage that have become almost the standard newspaper stories for the weeks leading up to and after the June long weekend. The Queen’s Birthday long weekend saw ACT police receive 86 reports of firework-related injuries. The most serious damage suspected to be related to
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