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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 1 Hansard (16 February) . . Page.. 198 ..
MR HARGREAVES (continuing):
people who lost their cars, if I have read the stories correctly, would have been put off the road for quite a considerable period anyway by the imposition of fines of a couple of thousand dollars on top of that. They would not have had the money to come up with for a $2,000 fine, I am pretty sure of that.
Mr Speaker, we do not want to see a person's property being removed and then sold. I do not think that that is a case of the punishment matching the crime. You can get into a nasty accident because you have been driving recklessly and cause an untold amount of damage and, generally speaking, suffer a lesser penalty than we are talking about today. We would like to see some action taken to stop burnouts. I have had quite a number of people ring my office recently and say, "I live in a place where there have been young kids doing burnouts and we have rung the police and asked them to come and stop these people and the police have said that it is not a serious enough offence for them to take the time to come out", so we have a law that cannot be enforced.
A person's vehicle can be impounded on suspicion that they have taken part in burnouts. I have some problems with that, too. It is a case of where the onus of proof lies. If the police impound a person's vehicle because they suspect that the person has done burnouts, the police will then charge the person whose vehicle has been impounded. If that person wants to make something of it, they have to go to court and try to get the charge overturned, but you cannot get into a court in a week; you just cannot do it. If, in fact, the matter does go to court and the magistrate says that there were mitigating circumstances and the car should not have been impounded, any amount of time can elapse before that person gets it back. A person could have had their vehicle removed from them for a month without it being necessary to do so.
Mr Speaker, I do not think that impounding these cars is going to be effective. By all means, stiffen up the financial penalties and stiffen up the number of points that they are going to lose or suspend their licence, but do not take away their property. It is, in my view, an infringement of their civil rights and liberties to do so. Indeed, the scrutiny of Bills committee made that point. That part of the process is actually infringing people's rights and liberties. I foreshadow that we will be trying to amend this Bill later to remove certain parts relating to burnouts. I shall say no more on that.
MR HUMPHRIES (Treasurer, Attorney-General and Minister for Justice and Community Safety) (4.15): I just have to respond to a small interjection from Mr Berry during those comments by Mr Hargreaves, pointing out that the legislation clearly has not worked because there are still people doing burnouts on the streets of Canberra. Members will be aware that we have had a number of seizures and impounding of vehicles under the legislation.
Mr Berry: How many?
MR HUMPHRIES
: There have been four such seizures. Those seizures are part of the process of getting the message to people who, for the most part, probably do not read the Canberra Times, watch WIN television or listen to ABC radio or whatever and who may not be aware that there are new laws making it very much tougher on people who choose to use the public streets and byways of this city as test tracks for burnouts. Mr Speaker, I think that the law is being applied effectively in these cases, that the
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