Page 1947 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 7 June 2017

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the offence. We acknowledge that it may be outside the court’s jurisdiction to entirely remove an image from the public space once distributed and acknowledge the limitations of what can be achieved in taking down online images at a sub-national level.

However, we believe that this is an important proposal for our community to consider as part of this complex issue. Once again, I would like to thank Mr Hanson for tabling his legislation this morning because, of course, it is clear that the issue needs to be addressed.

I also thank Mr Hanson for the changes that he has made to his draft. As I understand it, it has moved his legislation a lot closer to the draft that we are presenting. I welcome the impending outbreak of tripartisan agreement in this. I am very hopeful that the legislation that will be passed by the Assembly will be good legislation that will act on this technologically-facilitated abuse, this scourge.

My office has been working on this issue for some time. It was one of the ACT Greens’ election commitments last year. As I indicated when I tabled the petition developed by Rhys Michie last sitting period, we have been working on it since then. That is why I am very pleased today that I am in a position to be able to table an exposure draft of the legislation, an explanatory statement outlining what we are proposing and why, and a detailed discussion paper encouraging interested members of the community to provide feedback.

Given what Mr Hanson said, I think that we have been talking to very similar people about the situation. Clearly, we have all spoken to the various commissioners and we so far have had some very useful feedback on our discussion paper. I feel very positive that the ACT has waited long enough on this issue and that in the not-too-distant future we will see good reform coming from this Assembly on this emerging issue of technologically-facilitated abuse.

Bushfire abatement zone

Debate resumed from 10 May 2017, on motion by Mrs Jones, as amended:

“That this Assembly:

(1) notes that:

(a) Mr Ron McLeod’s 2003 report “Inquiry into the Operational Response to the January 2003 Bushfires in the ACT” made the following recommendations:

(i) “A bushfire-abatement zone (BAZ) should be defined between the north-west and western perimeter of Canberra and the Murrumbidgee River and the foothills of the Brindabella Range.”;

(ii) “A set of Bushfire Protection Planning Principles in relation to fire mitigation and suppression should be adopted and applied to future developments in the designated abatement zone.”; and


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