Page 4120 - Week 09 - Thursday, 26 August 2010
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Clause 130.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (6.27): I move amendment No 13 circulated in my name [see schedule 1 at page 4140].
Madam Assistant Speaker, this amendment introduces a new element to the process of maintaining incident registers. The bill would require a licence or permit holder to maintain an incident register, but it creates another nonsense if police become involved in the incident. If police are called to the scene of an incident, they will take control of the incident and will be required to record the incident in their own records.
Members of the industry have said to me that a permit or licence holder should not have to continue to make a record of the incident after police have taken control of the incident. Were it not so, the nonsense I outlined in my in-principle speech would come into play. A licensee or permit holder, even with the police in attendance, would need to continue to make a record until—well, we do not know when this responsibility stops. The bill is unclear on this. So this amendment will require the licence or permit holder to record certain information when the police take control of an incident and will not be required to record further details from that time.
I think this does a number of things, Madam Assistant Speaker. It stops duplication, and it makes it possible for licensees to comply with the incident register. Take an incident of the sort that we had last weekend. You have got a great big melee. This one was actually in the street but, if you have a fight in a large licensed premises, when the licensee comes along and says that he wants everybody to stop while he takes their names and addresses it is not practical, and it creates a situation where a licensee cannot comply. What the licensee has done is the right thing: he has called the police. The police have come in and taken control of it then. The police have more power, more authority, to take names and addresses, and the matter is contained.
It should then be the responsibility of the licensee to note that the incident occurred, to note that the police were called, and to note the name and the number of the officer who took control of the situation. That would make it easier for everyone to comply. There would be a trail of information, and it would be a better and simpler and more efficient way of doing it.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment, Climate Change and Water, Minister for Energy and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (6.29): The government will support this amendment, on the basis that, at the point where police take control of an incident, there is no longer a requirement for the licensee to make a record of anything that happened in relation to that incident. So I think the amendment is a good pick-up in terms of identifying at what point the record-keeping obligations of a licensee cease—and clearly they should cease once the police have intervened in relation to a matter. So the government will support the amendment.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (6.30): The Greens will also be supporting this amendment. We believe it strikes an appropriate balance between information that should be contained in the incident register and information that will be recorded by
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