Page 5330 - Week 12 - Thursday, 28 October 2010
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This is the issue. The minister has actually recognised this, because under the provisions as they now stand security officers had to do the same. A security officer had to say, “Fred Bloggs.” He could not say “c/o Star Security” or “c/o ABC Security”; he had to give his contact details. That has been gotten around, or the minister proposes to get around that. They obviously recognised that it was a problem.
What we have done is come up with a different approach from that which is currently in the legislation. The minister needs to understand this. The receipt will still be issued. There will be a receipt and there will be the compulsory passing on of the information to the registrar. There is one more step, which is essentially a line in an incident register. There is one more step, and that is the place where the identifying information about who seized it will be put. So if Mary Smith who works at the bar seizes something, Mary Smith has to write it on the incident register and has to be on there. Then it has to be ticked off that it has been sent to the registrar within the legislated time.
That is it in a nutshell. There are a number of amendments that you have to do to create this, but what we are doing with these amendments is creating a different approach to dealing with the confiscation of illegal documents. It is still notified to the registrar and it ensures that confidential information about the people who seized the document that they are entitled to keep private is kept private.
Most of my older children have worked in licensed establishments. I know that they have confiscated information like this, and I would have a real problem, as a parent, knowing that, under the law, my children, because they are bar staff and do not have a registration scheme, would be forced to provide their name and address or their name and phone number to some drunk.
That is what it boils down to. It is about providing essentially an occupational health and safety precaution for bar staff, who are, for the most part, our kids. Bar staff out there are generally young people who are working their way through university or getting a second job to save up to do something. This is a mechanism to protect our young people who work behind bars. It is quite simple.
Yes, there is another step. I do not deny that. But it is not an onerous amount of paperwork. There is already paperwork associated with every one of these confiscations. Really what it boils down to is this: “I have received something. I write on a receipt that says, ‘I give to Fred Bloggs a receipt for the documentation he provided me because I believe it is wrong’.” And it has the name of the licensed establishment on it. Then the licensed establishment register of an incident has the name of the person who collected it. It is a simple step.
The minister obviously recognises that this issue of security is a problem, because he has partly addressed this issue himself. My staff and I spent a lot of time with parliamentary counsel coming up with this. It does look a bit complicated, because there are a number of amendments, but when you put it all together it is actually quite a neat solution. On behalf of the thousands of young people who work behind bars, I implore the minister to reconsider his position, because this is an important measure to look after the security of those young people.
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