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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 4743 ..

Amendment agreed to.

Bill, as a whole, as amended, agreed to.

Bill, as amended, agreed to.

Debate resumed from 21 November 1996, on motion by Mr De Domenico:

That this Bill be agreed to in principle.

MR WHITECROSS (Leader of the Opposition) (5.35): The Opposition will be supporting this legislation. It is the result of a long and tortuous process by the Minister to address the conflicting needs of residents seeking to protect their amenity and individuals who own and operate trucks for a living, who have followed the practice of parking those trucks in residential areas. The Minister managed to get a lot of people around a table and to come to some agreement on rules that will regulate the way trucks can be parked in residential areas and restrict, to a certain degree, the kinds of trucks that can park in residential areas. The information I was given, and I am not in a position to assess this, was that the effect of this legislation could be that up to one-third of heavy vehicles currently parked in suburban residential areas will not be able to do so in the future, either because they are in one of the prescribed categories of vehicles or, more often, because the vehicles simply cannot comply with the requirements of the revised legislation because they cannot be parked behind the vehicle line or because of other related concerns.

It seems to me that this legislation makes some genuine progress towards addressing this issue. I think it will also have some indirect benefits in raising consciousness among the operators of vehicles about the importance of ensuring that they operate their vehicles in an appropriate manner and that they understand that if they are parking a heavy vehicle in a residential area they have responsibilities as citizens as well as rights.

The Opposition has always had one big concern about the approach the Government has taken in relation to this issue, and that has been its reluctance to address the question of alternative parking for drivers affected by these changes to the rules for parking heavy vehicles. It has been the Labor Party's contention, both in Mr Lamont's original discussion paper and since, that, if you are going to ask someone who has followed the practice of parking their vehicle in a suburb not to do it anymore, the community has a responsibility to tell them where they are going to park it. For some people, the decision to park vehicles at home is a matter of convenience, and there are commercial premises at which they could legitimately be expected to park those vehicles. But that is by no means always the case. It seems to me that it is appropriate that alternative parking facilities be made available to address the needs of those drivers who have nowhere else to park their vehicles.

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