Page 5292 - Week 14 - Thursday, 19 November 2009
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fireworks included damage to two vehicles, damage to a public toilet and damage to five mailboxes.
The reason the government has moved to ban the use of consumer fireworks is, as I said, to remove the ability for those who use fireworks illegally to disguise their illegal activities under the cover of what has been an authorised explosives celebration on the Queen’s Birthday long weekend.
And every year we have to acknowledge other communities. Every time I went to workplace relations minister meetings—and it is probably the case for Minister Hargreaves—on every attendance there, other industrial relations ministers asked the ACT government to ban the use of consumer fireworks. It is not just an issue that is peculiar to our community. We know that every year interstate residents regularly make the pilgrimage to Canberra to stock up on consumer fireworks.
Certainly the former industrial relations minister has been lobbied. I know that the Hon Bob Debus wrote to members of the ACT government to urge us to consider the importance of public safety when continuing to allow the sale of consumer fireworks in the ACT. In his view, in the arguments he put forward, and in the view of his government, the risk of injury to individuals and animals from fireworks outweighs public support for the private use of such fireworks. Other than border patrols, there is no regime that can be implemented to prevent a person driving in from New South Wales to illegally acquire a substance prohibited in their home state and then take it back home to breach even more regulations.
As members will be aware, the banning of consumer fireworks is a contentious issue within the Canberra community. I think it is a fifty-fifty split. We can look at individual phone surveys that may shift around that, but all of the data that I have seen over a number of years has the community equally divided on this.
It was with some difficulty that the government reached its final position on this. As members of this place know, and I am sure it happened in every party room, there were individual perspectives on this and memories of enjoying cracker night. I have put my hand up to be one of those. I am sorry that next June I will not be able to have fireworks in my back garden with my kids—maybe a few sparklers—but as health minister I also spend the June long weekend sitting there listening to loud explosions, hoping that some kid has not got their hand blown off and hoping that some teenagers mucking around in the drains are not doing something that is going to impact on them and their friends in a very horrific way.
These are the issues that have been debated within internal party rooms within this place. At the end of the day, the government has reached a position where we believe that further regulatory reforms, even ramping up enforcement, will not address the issues that confront this community for the month leading up to June and the month after June.
In the two previous fireworks seasons we have seen more complaints received. There was some easing off of this in around 2003, 2004 and 2005. I think the complaints started to ease off then. But between the 2005 and the 2008 fireworks seasons, there has been a 300 per cent increase in complaints to the Office of Regulatory Services. In
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