Luke Simpkins (Cowan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As federal members of parliament, we are used to receiving people or talking to people in our offices or out in the streets about federal issues. There is no doubt about that. But, of course, sometimes federal issues are not people's main concern. It is those things that happen right in front of their house, in front of their eyes or somewhere in the community which will often be the issue that they want to bring to us. As I always say, if it is important enough for someone to bring it to me, it is important enough for me to try and do something about it.

In the suburbs of Australia one of the great scourges and irritations for people, for the constituents of all our suburban electorates, is the issue of hooning—the reckless driving and the noisy, somewhat destructive activity that some people with performance cars get up to. At night, constituents, our families, worry about whether that loud noise—the spinning of wheels; the squealing of tyres—is going to result in a car coming through the front wall or into a bedroom of our houses. There have been plenty of examples of that. In the electorate of Cowan there have certainly been examples of that.

The question is what to do about it. For a long while I thought that we could do things like put speed humps on roads, and that would help with speeding issues and also with hooning. But, while that strengthens the resistance to hooning activities in those streets, the reality is that there are still other streets nearby, and we cannot afford to engineer out this hooning. We cannot afford to try to counter human nature and attitudes of hooning with only these sorts of engineering efforts.

It has been a problem for a long time, and I think it is a problem, as I said, throughout the country. Recently the police minister in Western Australia, the Hon. Liza Harvey, was talking at a forum that my wife, a councillor in the City of Wanneroo, had organised. The minister was talking about how Western Australia has covert hooning cameras and how effective they were becoming. They have been trialling them since June last year. I think this is an excellent way in which we can help protect the streets of our suburbs, and suburbs within Cowan as well. Often people in their houses are worried about going outside and trying to identify that number plate on the car or the driver. It is so important that there is this technology that now exists that can record details about those cars at night and during the day and help the police to identify who is responsible or which vehicle is doing these sorts of dangerous and reckless activities that risk lives and irritate so many people in the suburbs.

I raised this issue with the police. As I say to my constituents, and as the police say as well, if there are hooning incidents happening, the best thing to do is to report it to the police, and through that weight of numbers the police can identify where the priorities are for police attendance or police positioning of their vehicles and personnel or even these cameras. These things are linked together: the more reports the police have, the more chance there is of getting these cameras or the police in a position to try and catch the hoons.

But there is a limitation. According to the police, the hoons know that, if they say they cannot recall who was driving the car, they can get away with just a $500 fine—no loss of demerit points and no seizure of the vehicle. This is a major limitation. What is required is a change of law in Western Australia, and probably also in other states, so that the owner of the car has a strict liability for the actions of that car. They either have to give up the name of the person who was driving the vehicle and that person accepts all the responsibility, or they wear that responsibility themselves. That is what is required in Western Australia, and I hope that the Western Australian government will pursue that very soon.

Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It being 8 pm, the debate is interrupted.

House adjourned at 20:00