Page 182 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 13 February 2008
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the community roundtable which was held on 1 February. I want to update the Assembly a little on the genesis of it, some of the discussions at the roundtable, some of the outcomes and the ways forward.
The concerns over violent incidents in the community have been well publicised. Obviously the bashing of taxi drivers in Civic and the violence in Manuka subsequently are a real concern in the community. I have had a lot of community feedback about it, talkback, and we have seen it discussed in various community forums. It is fair to say that there is not hysteria about it but there is certainly a level of community angst and a level of community concern about the levels of safety in the community.
So that was the genesis of our roundtable. We looked at this issue and we thought we could just criticise the government for their failings or we could look to constructively engage with the community and the government and look for ways to solve some of these issues.
As I have said—I said it yesterday—alcohol and drug-fuelled violence or the binge drinking culture is an issue that we are not going to solve any time soon in our community, no matter what the government response is. This is a deep-seated cultural problem. We do have pockets of binge-drinking culture in our community and drug-taking culture as well which lead to poor outcomes for the community often, and we need to address that as a community. But that is a much deeper and more complex discussion and I am not going to pretend that I have any easy answers to that.
But what I would say is that there are ways we can make Civic safer, Manuka safer and our nightspots safer. There are things that can be done, and that was very much the idea behind the roundtable. And the roundtable brought together a number of different representatives from the community. There was, obviously, I and three relevant shadow ministers in Brendan Smyth, Steve Pratt and Bill Stefaniak. But there were also a number of other community representatives in Peter Barclay from King O’Malley’s and I think an AHA board member, Steven Fanner from the AHA, John McKeough representing the taxi drivers, Manny Notaras from Caphs, Dennis Gately from the AFPA, Tony Bryce from the Taxi Association, a representative of the Chamber of Commerce and Emmanuel Notaras from City Heart. It brought together a number of the key stakeholders. The TWU were invited but did not come along. The Chief Minister was also invited and was a late no show.
We sought to engage with the community and the government, and I felt that the mix of people we had at the roundtable was a good mix. They had a lot of on-the-ground experience, whether that be in policing or from the perspective of hoteliers, business owners or taxi drivers. They are on the front line on Friday and Saturday nights. They were able to give us feedback as to what they see as the real issues and some of the prospective solutions.
I think it is fair to say that there were, amongst the attendees, mixed feelings at the level of the problem. There was certainly a feeling amongst some that there is no problem or the problem is minimal. I think it is fair to say that things have got better over the last 15 or so years, and that was put to us. Also, to the contrary, there were others who said it has got worse.
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