Page 3979 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 9 November 1994
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Madam Speaker, I turn to the Statute Law Revision (Penalties) Bill and the committee's report on it. I think that the committee is prepared to accept - I personally am prepared to accept - the majority of the responses by the Attorney-General to the recommendations of the committee. Certainly, in the case of some of the responses, the Minister has persuaded me that that position should be adopted and that the recommendation of the committee should not proceed. In others, he has picked up the recommendation and has accepted it anyway.
In the case of the recommendation concerning the penalty review principles, Ms Szuty has, helpfully, recorded those principles in a permanent place. At one stage, the committee recommended that the principles appear as a preamble to the legislation. That, clearly, is a very ephemeral place in which to put them. Even the explanatory memorandum, where we found them, is an ephemeral document. But Hansard, we hope, will be a document of some permanence that people can refer to. When they see that on 9 November 1994 the Interpretation (Amendment) Bill was passed and that the penalty review principles were stated in the Assembly on that day, it is a way of realising what was the philosophy behind that whole approach. So, Madam Speaker, that is the position. I have no quibbles at all with the 66 amendments put forward by the Minister.
I would make one final point, Madam Speaker. Mrs Grassby was kind enough in her remarks to thank the committee staff for the hard work they did in preparing this committee report. That is very commendable of her; but in this case it, unfortunately, overlooks one fairly significant piece of information which ought to have been taken notice of. That is that the committee did not have any staff when it actually prepared the report. The 106 pages of this document were gone through by me, as chairman of the committee, and I prepared this report for the committee's perusal. The committee itself then worked on the draft report and prepared it. My secretary and my wife actually typed it. So, I will take the liberty of translating Mrs Grassby's thanks to the non-existent committee staff as thanks to my secretary and my wife, and I will so convey her thanks to them.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General and Minister for Health) (4.53), in reply: I thank members for their support. I particularly thank the committee for what has been a fairly massive exercise. This has involved two issues. One is the simple concept of using penalty units, which was something that I, as a private member, suggested when I first came into the Assembly. I seem to recall that I actually moved a private members Bill to do it from opposition - although, back in the days of the Alliance Government, private members business never really got anywhere. It was a fairly bleak existence. So, that attempt collapsed; but the exercise has now been picked up.
Simply having the Bill provide for penalty units was the easy bit. The difficult bit, which was never going to be possible for a private member, was to actually make sense of it and put it through all the Acts of the ACT. What officers of the department have done is to go through massive statutes, involving hundreds of provisions, try to make some sense of them and apply those principles that Ms Szuty has read into Hansard, so that we have some consistency across ACT law. It was not an easy task. In some areas there are points of fine judgment to be made, and you could really call it either way. The committee adopted a very constructive approach to what could easily have been a hopelessly combative task and went through a raft of recommendations.
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