Page 3620 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 16 October 1990
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Murder Prosecutions
MRS NOLAN: Mr Speaker, my question is addressed to the Attorney-General. Can he inform the house whether he is considering abolishing the year-and-a-day rule - and I refer him to Mr Dowd's comments on this very issue - given the problems with needle bandits injecting people with the AIDS virus?
MR COLLAERY: I thank Mrs Nolan for the question. I was not intending to consider it immediately, in question time, but certainly I am pleased to inform the house of the initiative taken by Mr Dowd in abandoning the year-and-a-day rule. The year-and-a-day rule, Mr Speaker, means that one cannot be prosecuted for murder, for instance, if one's victim lives for a year and a day after the immediate physical impact that one caused.
That, of course, is very relevant to the needlestick bandit injury assault that has tragically occurred, and may occur again in the community. Certainly that threat of violence is a very real one in the community at the moment. I have looked recently at the New South Wales law, but also, more interestingly, at amendments to the Victorian law. Those amendments were brought forward and became law in May this year, and section 120 of the Victorian Health (General Amendment) Act 1988 specifies an offence punishable by $20,000 for a person who knowingly or recklessly infects another person with an infectious disease. A further subsection in that legislation provides a defence where the person infected with the infectious disease knew of or voluntarily accepted the risk of being infected with that infectious disease.
To my knowledge, there have been no prosecutions under the New South Wales legislation, which has some difficulties of proof about it; but this more recent provision in Victoria offers the prospect of prosecuting those people, and clearly with a fine of that size there would be a substantial default period of imprisonment in the event of failure to pay the fine.
The provision, if introduced in the ACT - and I am currently considering bringing that matter before the criminal law consultative committee - would provide some redress for those in the community who either have been threatened recently with that offence or may become the victims of such a dreadful, brutal assault.
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