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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 03 Hansard (Thursday, 11 March 2004) . . Page.. 1156 ..

I have a concern with the criminal code, which is meant to be national. It is a process which took about 10 years before anything was done. In this jurisdiction, I might have introduced part 1 and it is good to see that the government is continuing. It seems now that only the Commonwealth is well advanced on us. The ACT is faithfully going down the line of introducing a code and the other states are somewhat lagging behind.

That is something I would like the Attorney to take that up with his colleagues at SCAG. I am going off to a meeting fairly soon with the shadow attorneys and the Commonwealth Attorney. I will be mentioning to my colleagues that the national criminal code is worth supporting. Crime knows no boundaries and it is absolutely essential that we have similar—or, ideally, identical—laws nationally in this area. I would also like to see a national sentencing code. Some of the other states are dragging the chain on this matter, and that is a problem.

I have been told to shut up by my Whip. Thank you, Vicki. I am not going to regurgitate the things that I basically agree with in the Attorneys’ speech. Suffice to say that there are a few new features here. There is an interesting offence of payola not only in the traditional sense of public officials but also in a commercial sense. I think that is very sensible. The government does not include the offence of stealing cars. There is no offence of carjacking, which I think I had in a bill which was dismissed in this Assembly late last year and which does apply in a number of other jurisdictions. I do not know if that is an oversight. I commend its inclusion to the government. When I reintroduce my bill, as amended, later on it will include that offence, obviously redrafted, to conform with this new code. All in all, the code is supported by all the relevant agencies. It is timely and I think it will enhance the operation of the criminal law in this most important area, the area of fraud and related offences in the ACT jurisdiction.

MS DUNDAS (9.45): Today we are debating chapter 3 of the criminal code. This gives us a chance to reflect more generally on criminal law, how we deal with crime and even why we believe certain things are crimes. We have addressed before the process of developing the criminal code and the goal of harmonising criminal law across Australia, so I will not spend much time treading that familiar path. I refer members to my earlier comments, when the Assembly passed chapter 2 of the criminal code, for the Democrats’ stance on the criminal code more generally.

However, I note that chapter 3 deals with theft, fraud, bribery and similar offences and that the penalties of these offences are in line with those that currently exist in the Crimes Act. This piece of legislation is not about creating new offences or penalties for crimes; it is about setting out the legal principles that our courts should follow in enforcing these laws, including how these offences are constructed, the definitions and elements of each crime and the operation of some parts of the common law with regard to these offences.

I think we need to take a step back and look at the whole concept of laws that protect individual property. It is very true that our economic system is based upon the granting of property rights to material goods and even many abstract assets, such as intellectual property. Property rights are the most basic requirement of a market economy, and that is the economic system that we have inherited. It will continue to be the system in some form that we will have for some time to come. But I wish to make the comment that the

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