Page 673 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 5 July 1989
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This Bill is vital. It addresses extremely important questions before this community. The people in the public gallery of this place at the moment can, I think, tell us all a great deal about what it is like to have personal dignity infringed, have loved ones taken from them or have every civil right, which the Labor Party claims to defend as important, affronted by the way that crime occurs on the streets of this city. Perhaps the armchair socialists opposite me, who live in comfortable suburbs and who do not often have to go to bus shelters or places where these sorts of crimes occur, do not understand the sorts of problems that are faced. But I can assure you that there are people in this community who do and who are well aware of what can happen in this community if we do not take action now to change the situation.
This Bill is just such a measure. This Bill is designed to look at street crime in Canberra. It is vitally important; it is urgent; it has to be addressed quickly. The Government clearly is not interested in addressing these issues, and I believe that this referral to a select committee is appropriate to make sure we get to the bottom of the issue.
Mr Speaker, I do not believe the Government has any good intentions on this question. I do not believe that its desire to have it referred to a standing committee which is coming back on 30 September is in any way an indication of its good intentions. I say that on the basis of what has already been said by the Chief Minister and others to the media and, in particular, to rent-a-crowd yesterday out the front of this building, suggesting, for example, on the part of the Chief Minister that this Bill will in some way infringe the capacity of people to demonstrate legitimately in public places or to conduct pickets outside places of employment, when she knew full well that it was a totally untrue statement, that the Bill was to be amended, with the suggestion coming from the proponent of the Bill, to allow those things to occur, so we are getting down in the thrust of this Bill to only the basic issue of street crime - not picketing, not demonstration, but street crime. Those bad intentions on the part of the Government make me most reluctant to accede to its request not to have this matter go forward today in the manner suggested by Mr Collaery.
It is ridiculous to suggest that, because we cannot address the underlying causes of street crime, we cannot therefore deal with the symptoms. Of course we can. I fully sympathise with the points that have been raised by the Government in this regard. We have to address the basic problems there.
But, in the meantime, I am not prepared to go out to the people who have been victims of crime in this city and say, "Well, I am sorry, but the person who bashed your son or the person who smashed your window or the person who robbed you on the way home from the shops and took your pension
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