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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 4 Hansard (18 April) . . Page.. 1104 ..

MS TUCKER (3.54): Mr Speaker, I love it: Team building! We go out and try to kill each other! Is this how teams work in the bureaucracy; is this how it works in the private sector; or is this the private sector against the bureaucracy? How does it work? You have made a whole lot of statements - - -

Mr De Domenico: Do you want a game?

MS TUCKER: It would be really good here. It would be in character.

The thing that I was really interested to hear Mr Stefaniak say was that there are no mishaps, there are no consequences, and it is just having fun. What we have right now in our society, in the community and in the world generally is a start. People are reacting. I was interested to hear you say, "A woman said that it was okay". I think it is interesting that you had to bring that in. A woman is trying to stop people having homebirth publicly funded, too. Let us not just think that, because women are there, we are going to get - - -

Mr Stefaniak: I did not say that. I think you have misquoted me there. I did not say anything about a woman.

MS TUCKER: It might not have been you, actually. It was about a woman criminologist. Who said that?

Mr Humphries: I did.

MS TUCKER: Mr Humphries did. I would like to point out that that was not particularly relevant. I would question the relevance of that comment. The point is that there is extreme alarm. It may be amusing to see Mrs Carnell going "Bang!" to Mr Moore. One part of me laughs at that and another part of me is deeply offended. What we have right around this globe is violence to a level which is of huge concern, with women, children, men, old people - everybody - dying and suffering. We now have a society where we are getting more and more concerned about violence, and we want to know why it is there.

What is the basic message that you are giving here? It is, "Let us play with guns; it is fun. Let us try to kill each other. We are only playing; it is fun". Mr Osborne says that it is okay; he does not really like it and it would be hypocritical to - - -

Mr Stefaniak: Kids have played cowboys and indians since time immemorial.

MS TUCKER: This is very true, and I will address that in a minute. One of the things he said was that, if all these other games were not in existence, he would not support this. The other approach you can take, which is the one we would take, is that, if there are concerns about the amount of violence and how it is being fostered within the community and amongst our young people, we need to look at it. There are a lot of people working now to lobby the Federal Government about what is in video games, what sorts of games we are providing for recreation for our young people. That is the way we would like to move.

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