Page 4160 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 15 November 2005
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impact on, for instance, a severely disabled child of a sole parent who is the offender. The Liberal Party is seriously suggesting—just imagine that as a scenario—a sole parent, who has a severely disabled child and who, perhaps out of absolute desperation or destitution, commits an offence, is before a magistrate and is facing imprisonment and the magistrate, when sentencing, is not to be informed of or is to have no account of the fact that that sole parent is the sole provider of a severely disabled child.
It is a remarkable proposition for the Liberal Party in the Australian Capital Territory to put that a magistrate, being asked by a prosecutor to send an offender to prison, is not to have regard to the effects of that imprisonment on a severely disabled, dependent child. That is a remarkable suggestion. It highlights this hard-heartedness, this flintiness, this total lack of compassion and humanity that are the inexorable result of a rush to be tough on crime—to be tougher than tough, to be out there saying, “We are really hard on criminals,” without any regard for the implications for the rest of society.
Mr Pratt: It is better than being soft all the time.
MR STANHOPE: Mr Pratt says he fully supports the notion that the sole parent of a disabled child should be sent to prison without any regard being had to the implications for the disabled child. Mr Pratt comes in and gives support to his shadow attorney on that notion.
Amendment 8 will also be opposed by the government. This amendment would delete the imposition of a penalty causing a particular hardship upon an offender as a factor when the court sentences an offender. Once again, this is a particularly high threshold. Courts will not mitigate solely on the basis of illness or disease. However, it has been relevant in cases involving vulnerable offenders such as people with severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric disabilities or, where appropriate, custodial settings were not available. This factor should be retained. A court, surely, should be able to have regard, in sentencing an offender, to the particular hardship that an offender might suffer as a result of being imprisoned.
One needs to get to the heart of this. We need to drill down into what it is that the Liberal Party in the ACT is suggesting here. We saw it in relation to the potential impact on a disabled child. Just imagine a person with a severe psychiatric condition, a psychiatric disability of some sort, who comes before a court as a result of offending behaviour. Mr Stefaniak does not believe—and the Liberal Party in the ACT does not believe—that a magistrate should have regard to the particular hardship that a person with a severe psychiatric disability would face in being imprisoned. That is remarkable.
Amendment 9 would delete whether the offender has demonstrated remorse as a factor when a court sentences an offender. The amendment would mean that the court had no scope to assess whether the offender was genuinely remorseful or not. Remorse is a factor that is and should be relevant to sentencing. Considerations of remorse as a factor should, of course, be retained. Just imagine what it is that the Liberal Party is here suggesting: a young 18-year-old, never been in strife with the police before, never been before a court before, knows he has done something absolutely stupid—and there but for the grace of God, of course, goes every single one of us—is absolutely and utterly remorseful of something that he has done that is completely out of character and exhibits and displays the depth of that remorse for his behaviour, and Mr Stefaniak and the
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