Page 5874 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 7 December 2010
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people of the ACT, with contempt. I wonder if that laziness, that arrogance and that contempt will ever abate.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (4.35): The Greens will be supporting this fourth and final JACS bill for 2010. The bill makes changes to 12 pieces of legislation related to the justice portfolio. Some of the changes add flexibility to what has proven over time to be an unnecessarily rigid process. The Human Rights Commission amendments are a good example of that. Some of the changes empower statutory bodies to go out and equip themselves with better technology to do their jobs better and more efficiently. A good example of this is the amendments to the Public Trustee Act which will allow the trustee to keep an electronic register of wills and powers of attorney.
Whether they are adding flexibility or better equipping government agencies to go about their job, the amendments all update and improve our laws. The majority of the changes are minor and technical, and I will not repeat what has already been set out in the explanatory statement and said by the attorney.
There is one particular amendment, however, that I think goes one step further and, while not introducing large-scale policy change, does make changes of substance which warrant discussion in the Assembly today. These are the amendments to the Security Industry Act that Mrs Dunne has already spoken about to some extent.
The amendments do two things. Firstly, they set up a cross-border recognition system for licensed security workers and, secondly, they restate exactly what activities are regulated by the Security Industry Act. The cross-border recognition amendments will set up a system whereby the ACT can recognise the licence of a security worker licensed in another jurisdiction, such as New South Wales.
Under the system, a security guard licensed in New South Wales will be able to apply for a temporary authorisation to work in the ACT for one-off events such as the Foreshore Music Festival. This will improve on the current situation where the workers are required to apply for a full ACT licence, even where their work only requires them to be in the ACT for one day.
I do doubt that there was a high rate of compliance with this seemingly unnecessary process. That is not to cast any judgements against the security industry. I simply think the requirement was overly onerous, given the need for police checks and the associated expense that accompanied a full licence application. The new system will require the worker to have a current licence in another jurisdiction. Given that all states and territories now have the same processes of police record checks, we are cutting down on duplication and increasing the prospects of incoming workers complying with the requirements.
The second set of amendments restates exactly what activities are regulated by the Security Industry Act. The revised list of activities will now include for the first time the reference to a security guard carrying a firearm. This is a departure from the current approach where there is no reference to the fact that security guards can carry a gun. On an initial or cursory reading, this set of amendments raised the question of
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