Page 3978 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 9 November 1994
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7. Imprisonment should not be prescribed as a penalty for a minor offence, and imprisonment only (without provision for a fine) should be prescribed only in exceptional circumstances.
8. A penalty prescribed in regulations or other subordinate legislation should not exceed a fine of $1,000 in the case of an individual or $5,000 in the case of a body corporate, and a term of imprisonment should not be prescribed in regulations.
9. A general penalty or a maximum penalty calculated by reference to a formula which requires proof of 1 or more elements should not be prescribed.
Madam Speaker, I think it is useful for the Assembly to have a record of the principles which have formed the basis of the very many amendments which will be made to the various Acts that we are considering.
In its response to the committee's report, the Government agreed to six of the committee's 12 recommendations. That is not a very high number. Certainly, one of the major factors that the committee took into consideration in terms of its response to the Statute Law Revision (Penalties) Bill was that we were looking for consistency of application, given that an apparent lack of consistency was what many people drew attention to when the Bill was originally tabled in the Assembly. Madam Speaker, I propose to leave my comments there at this stage. I may participate further in debate on the Bill after other members have spoken.
MR HUMPHRIES: (4.49) Madam Speaker, in addressing all three of the matters before the committee, let me say, first of all, that the Interpretation (Amendment) Bill (No. 3) is a very important piece of legislation. It is one that has been talked about for at least four years, as far as I can recall, and its arrival is extremely important. As members know, exercises like the one inherent in the Statute Law Revision (Penalties) Bill have to be done every so often when you have legislation which expresses penalties in monetary units - dollars or, in some cases of legislation I have found, pounds. It necessarily involves a process of constant updating. It makes enormous sense to avoid that lumbering process by actually enacting the concept of penalty units. So, rather than saying that there is a penalty of $100, we say "one penalty unit". As inflation takes its toll - it has not done so lately, but I expect that at some stage it may well do so again - we can simply amend the value of a penalty unit rather than having to amend thousands of items in legislation in an exercise like this revision Bill.
The arrival of penalty units is very important. In a sense, it makes the Acts and statutes, to which people refer to see what penalties are, a little less user-friendly. They see that an offence is committed if they do a certain thing and they discover that the penalty for doing that is 10 penalty units; but they may not know that, as of the year 2002, a penalty unit is worth $124.50, or whatever it might be. It may be that the Government should consider having that information fairly readily available in such places as libraries in case people want to have access to it. That is a small suggestion.
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