Page 3928 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 1 December 2021
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The bill would make COVID-19 health directions legislative instruments, which is something the opposition has been calling for. The bill would also restate the cautioning requirements for authorised officers and police, meaning that they would not have to apply the caution requirement in criminal laws to a person who admitted that they were guilty of an offence related to a health direction.
During the COVID-19 emergency, the opposition has sought to have the various health directions made notifiable instruments that must be listed on the ACT legislation register. The Chief Health Officer has consistently made those publicly available on the legislation register on a voluntary basis. It is a key principle that rules that we expect Canberrans to comply with should be available to those people as a matter of course. We know that COVID-19 public health directions have been a huge impost on our community. Ensuring that they are required to be publicly available as notifiable instruments is an important reform.
The Canberra Liberals support proposed changes to the caution requirements for people suspected of having breached a public health direction. In our briefing, we were advised that the current interaction of the enforcement provisions of the Public Health Act 1997 and the ACT’s criminal laws has a number of undesirable effects. Specifically, we understand that currently when a person makes an admission about non-compliance with a COVID-19 health direction—for example, they are not wearing a face mask—an officer must formally caution the person and record any admissions in a form prescribed under the Crimes Act 1900. Officials advised the Canberra Liberals that this had the consequence that currently officers were likely to proceed to issuing infringement notices rather than obtaining further information about the reasons, and possible excuses, for non-compliance with a COVID-19 health direction.
The bill will provide for alternative cautioning requirements to those in the Crimes Act 1900. The bill affects a person’s right against self-incrimination. The scrutiny committee identified this as an issue for the Assembly to consider. The opposition believes that in this case the change is appropriate, but we thank the scrutiny committee for bringing it to our attention.
The bill could result in a person becoming liable for an offence in relation to public health directions that were made before the commencement of this bill. This raises the issue of retrospectivity. We would ordinarily be highly concerned about such a provision. In this case, however, given that the public health directions are being regularly remade, we acknowledge that there is opportunity for ongoing scrutiny in this regard.
Finally, I want to talk about what this bill is not. It is not a Dan Andrews style bill intended to allow for greater restrictions to be imposed by the executive without any recourse to this Assembly.
We understand that the government will be presenting a bill tomorrow that will deal with COVID-19 restrictions in an ongoing way. I would like to thank the health minister for offering the opposition a briefing on the bill prior to its introduction. We will scrutinise the bill closely.
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