Page 2050 - Week 07 - Thursday, 16 June 1994
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LEGAL AFFAIRS - STANDING COMMITTEE
Report on Statute Law Revision (Penalties) Bill 1993
MR HUMPHRIES (12.02): Madam Speaker, pursuant to order, I present report No. 4 of the Standing Committee on Legal Affairs entitled Statute Law Revision (Penalties) Bill 1993, together with extracts from the minutes of proceedings, and I move:
That the report be noted.
Madam Speaker, I shall speak to this report only briefly because of the other matters on the Assembly agenda today. The Statute Law Revision (Penalties) Bill was presented by the Attorney-General on 16 December, and it made many large changes to the structure of penalty provisions in ACT legislation. It was presented at the same time as an Interpretation (Amendment) Bill which has the effect of putting penalty units in place in ACT legislation. Of course, penalty units are a convenient device to ensure that, where inflation has some effect on the level of penalties provided for in legislation, these levels can be increased by simply amending the amount of the penalty unit and that has an effect across all legislation that the Territory has in force.
The Statute Law Revision (Penalties) Bill was designed to set in place penalty units in a whole range of ACT legislation but also to revise the level of penalty provided for in many ACT Acts. It was particularly that second question that the Legal Affairs Committee focused some attention on. The committee decided to review the penalties provided in the 106 pieces of legislation, a very large number of separate items of legislation, that had to be examined by the committee, to ensure that these changes were appropriate and met standards which the community as a whole would expect to be applied. I think it is true to say that the committee applied standards to ascertain whether consistency was employed, whether the fines were appropriate and whether they were equitable. For the most part, I must say that we found that this was indeed the case - that, although many changes were made, they reflected the nature of the offences which were covered by the legislation and the extent to which those particular offences might have changed in the course of the last few years.
It is important to understand, Madam Speaker, that these matters can cause some concern in the community. In the period after this legislation was tabled there were a number of letters to the editor of the Canberra Times in which concern was expressed about the level of penalties in ACT legislation. Mrs Linda O'Donoghue, for example, wrote a letter to the Canberra Times in January of this year in which she said:
The standard fine for a kid casually selling cookies door-to-door for pocket money would be $5000 (unlicensed hawking) ... One incongruity I find especially grim: the fine for having up to five marijuana plants is to remain a paltry $100.
That was only one of a number of pieces of correspondence and other representations which gave rise to concern about what the penalties would be in particular pieces of legislation. The committee examined all of those and, as I have indicated, found for the most part that they were appropriate and equitable across the board. It is important to
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