Page 4159 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 15 November 2005
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
sentencing practices. Again, I think this is a narrow point of view. We must keep ourselves open to considering what is occurring at a territory and federal level, and consequently I oppose this amendment.
Finally, amendment No 11 appears to be again part of the posturing on a populous tough-on-crime stance. It does not seem to recognise that in some circumstances a sentence might not be appropriate or that, if a behaviour order is awarded, this may have a severe impact on the offender. This should be considered. It is important that we are able to have that flexibility, so I cannot agree to support that amendment.
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment and Minister for Arts, Heritage and Indigenous Affairs) (5.15): The government opposes this raft of amendments, for very much the same reasons as Dr Foskey has outlined.
Amendment 5 is opposed. It would inherently link remorse with the making of a reparation payment. Dr Foskey went to this point as well. It may be an indicator of remorse but it is certainly not determinative of remorse. An offender may make a payment to give the impression of remorse but in fact behave in a way that demonstrates quite completely a lack of remorse. Mr Stefaniak’s amendment would link the two inextricably in a way that reality does not or would not accept.
Amendment 6 is also opposed. The amendment would delete cultural background as a factor that a court must consider when sentencing an offender. The foreshadowed amendment to clause 42 would remove the requirement of the court to be informed of the offender’s cultural background when a pre-sentence report is being prepared. I find it a quite remarkable suggestion by the opposition that a court should be denied any knowledge of an offender’s cultural background at both the pre-sentence stage and at the sentencing stage. I cannot believe that there is anybody in 2005 that believes that cultural background is not a relevant factor when sentencing.
Indeed the High Court in Leeth v the commonwealth summarised succinctly that the common law may have failed adequately to acknowledge or address the fact that in some circumstances, theoretically, equality under the law sustains rather than alleviates the practical reality of social and economic inequality. And that is no more the case than in relation to indigenous Australians. I find that a remarkable amendment for the opposition to propose.
Similarly, the opposition amendment would remove the effects on family or dependants as a factor that a court must consider when sentencing an offender. Mr Stefaniak believes that a court should not take into account, when sentencing a person to imprisonment, the implications for that person’s family. It is the most hard-hearted attitude for anybody, any party, in this day and age to take in relation to sentencing—in relation to crime and punishment—to suggest that an offender should be treated in isolation from his family and that the family should effectively be also subliminally or directly punished as a result of the actions of an offender.
It is an incredibly high threshold that you would impose—well beyond any expected or humane consideration of the consequences of the separation of a father or a mother, say, from that father or mother’s children—that there be no capacity to take into account the
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .