Page 2434 - Week 08 - Thursday, 6 August 2015
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briefings that my staff have taken, that the legislation being enacted is in response to one incident, a very sad incident, in which an individual crashed a motorised bike and sadly died. It was reported in the press that that individual was not wearing a helmet. Certainly the sort of engine that that individual had on his pushbike would not have been compliant under the existing legislation. So the problem is not with the legislation. That would not have been a registrable bicycle. So it would not have been compliant under ACT legislation. It would not have been compliant under the Australian road rules.
I do understand that the intention of this is to make it easier on the ground for police to monitor and say, “If you ban all petrol engines it makes it easier for us to not have to worry about determining whether it’s under 200 watts or over 200 watts. Let’s just ban them all.” The problem with that is that those devices are already banned, so you are not going to change those sorts of behaviours. It will pick up anybody who is currently working within the rules, within the guidelines, with a small rotary engine perhaps, that provides less than 200 watts, doing the right thing and doing exactly what the electric motors currently provide.
It seems that, for whatever reason, if you have an electric motor, the government is saying it is okay. If you have a petrol engine, it is not okay. This would make our laws inconsistent with the Australian road rules. The only argument that seems to be put forward is that it will make it easier on the ground to determine whether something is above or under 200 watts. That is not a good enough reason. It should be pretty evident, I would have thought, on inspection by police or any other authority as to whether it is a small rotary engine under 200 watts or whether it is some retrofitted lawnmower engine. I do not think that is the sort of complexity that is going to bother a police officer on the ground.
Given that, I see no compelling argument to change this legislation when it is in response to something that is already not legal in the ACT. It is essentially punitive and is outlawing something that would still be permissible with an electric motor. The case has not been made. We want to encourage bike use. We want to encourage it particularly for older Canberrans who might need that sort of assistance from a small motor. I do not know how many people are using that assistance, but if there are any, we will be saying to those people, “You can’t do that anymore. Get off your bike.” I cannot imagine why Mr Rattenbury, who often talks about wanting to encourage bike use in the ACT, would now be introducing legislation that would make that illegal in the ACT.
I foreshadow that we will not be supporting the amendment that has been provided at late notice. I do acknowledge that there are reasons for the late notice, and I do acknowledge that my staff received a brief on this. But the reality is that this is coming in at late notice. This is about preventing the Road Transport Authority from releasing private information to car park owners. Any business has the right to legally recover its debts through any legal means. Making it harder, or indeed impossible, for a business to legally recover debt is something that needs to be approached very cautiously. In this case it is entirely arguable that without this process businesses of this sort will not be able to recover debts without either substantially or expensively altering their business model or involving the government’s time and resources.
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