Page 299 - Week 01 - Thursday, 11 February 2010
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I do not think it is necessarily a negative or a bad thing that half of the comments were contrary to reducing the speed limits. That is why you do consultation. You do consultation so that you do get the feedback. If half the people are saying that they do not want the speed limits reduced, that is something that we have to consider. We are representatives and, if the community is saying they do not want to lower the speed limits, then that is something that we have to take into account. Of course, we have got a responsibility regarding safety and the general management of the city, but we certainly need to take into account that roughly half the respondents did have some concerns with lowering the speed limits.
I also think we have to be careful we do not fall into the trap of saying that lowering speed limits will save lives; therefore, we have to keep lowering them indefinitely. That is where that argument does go. Eventually, it gets to a point where we are not going to have any road deaths, not going to have any deaths caused by car accidents, because there are no cars on the road. So we do have to take a reasonable approach to this.
Lowering the speed limit to 40 kilometres an hour may be reasonable—it may not be—but I think we do have to make sure that we do not extrapolate this too far and then say, “How about we reduce the parkway to 80 kilometres an hour?” or “How about we reduce the Gungahlin speed limit from 80 to 10?” The most people can do there is about 20 kilometres an hour anyway; so that would not be such a huge difference.
I do think we have to be very cautious when lowering the speed limit that we are not simply driven by an argument that lower speed limits will save lives, therefore we must lower every speed limit. I think we have to be very cautious and make sure this city is liveable and that we do get proper efficiencies from our road system, especially when you have got people living as far north as Forde, and as far south as parts of Tuggeranong, like Calwell, Theodore or Conder. So I think we have to be very reasonable about this and make sure we are not hurting the productivity of Canberra by lowering the speed limits willy-nilly just so we can perhaps satisfy an agenda to get more cars off the road.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
Domestic Animals Amendment Bill 2009
Debate resumed from 10 December 2009 on motion by Mr Stanhope:
That this bill be agreed to in principle.
MR COE (Ginninderra) (11.47): I rise to speak on the Domestic Animals Amendment Bill 2009. This bill will amend two areas of the principal act, the Domestic Animals Act 2000. Firstly, this will ensure that people who have suffered injury or loss as a result of a dog attack or harassment are able to get information about the owner of the dog. Section 55 of the Domestic Animals Act 2000 provides that compensation must be paid by a person to another person who is injured or
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