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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 8 Hansard (9 August) . . Page.. 2781 ..

MR MOORE: Wayne knows. It is interesting to look back over that period. Ms Tucker cites the very eloquent speech I made at the time. Of course, this has been an area of oscillation for me.

Mr Berry: It sure has.

MR MOORE: It has. It has always been one of the most difficult issues for me to deal with. I know that some people will find that funny. On one hand, Ms Tucker was quite right in all those things that she cited. On the other, a very practical and pragmatic thing that I learned as a teacher, and I am sure that Mr Wood learned, was that if you knew trouble was brewing at the school level and you did something about it you did not wind up with a problem. Often experience would tell you that trouble was brewing. If you broke it up early, you did not wind up with a problem. I did that many times as a teacher.

The question for me has always been: should police be able to do so in the same way? What restrictions should there be? How should that be done. Mr Speaker, the important point here and the reason I am going to support this clause tonight is that it is about violence. The more I look around me and see the way some small sections of the community deal with violence, the more I think that we need to find ways of dealing with it other than arresting people and charging them, if at all possible.

Ms Tucker raises the issue, and rightly so, that this legislation is likely to have more impact on specific groups in the ACT. I think that we all can name them. Ms Tucker referred to one of the groups as the beanie boys. That is only one of them. Mr Speaker, over the years since I last opposed this legislation, I have not heard of one complaint with the legislation. When something is not working, the norm is for members of this Assembly to hear of the problems. In other words, the community has generally accepted the prerogative of a police officer to say, "No, trouble is brewing; you have got to move out of here."

Mr Berry: There were complaints from the word go, Michael.

MR MOORE: Mr Berry interjects, correctly, that there were complaints from the word go. I remember that the first complaint lodged involved a son of a member of the Assembly. That is not to say that the member necessarily encouraged the son, but a son of a member of the Assembly at that time was involved in the first complaint. As I recall, an appeal was taken to court on it.

Mr Berry: There were two of them.

MR MOORE: That may well have been the case. As I say, this issue has always been one of the most difficult issues for me. In some ways it was made somewhat easier last time round because my vote on it did not count anyway, but it may well do so this evening. I have no idea what Mr Kaine is going to do. I think he has always voted the opposite way to me on this issue, anyway. It seems to me that the powers are not causing the problems that I had been worried about. I hope that they are solving some of the problems of violence that I worry about.

Clause 9 agreed to.

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