Page 4398 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 22 November 2005
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
necessarily be sentenced to one year. I would not necessarily see that occurring if at 14 he committed one burglary and at 19 he committed one burglary. Clearly that, in itself, would be significantly mitigating. When you look at the other points there, obviously the one year would not apply. But if he committed 30 or 40 offences at 14 and if he committed another 20 or 30 offences at 19, something like this clearly comes into play. In fact, a court could impose more.
I follow what happens in sentencing. We need better stats than we are getting at present. Take the offence of burglary. For multiple burglaries the courts have been imposing some jail terms and, in some instances, some significant jail terms. I do not see anything particularly extraordinary in relation to example 9.
Quite clearly, it is a case of wanting to be serious about having appropriate laws for serious offences. Both the attorney and Dr Foskey are saying, “You are interfering with the discretion of the court.” “You are putting another layer,” I think the attorney said, “of things a court has to consider.” Standard parole periods are on top of what is there already. You are doing that with this bill we are debating anyway.
Twenty or 30 years ago sentencing under the Crimes Act was about one page long. It has only been since the early 1980s that there has been a plethora of additional legislation and additional clauses put in the Crimes Act in terms of guidelines for courts. And that is all I am doing, putting in these additional guidelines for courts so that they can address relevant, proper community expectations. Both you, attorney, and Dr Foskey are out of kilter with what the community expects in terms of dealing with serious offenders, especially serious violent offenders and offenders who pray on the weaknesses of others by supplying significant qualities of illicit drugs. That is what we are talking about here.
In terms of these bills being different to what my colleague put in the submission in 2003, that is nonsense. These bills, in a slightly different form but with these provisions, were before the Assembly. They might have even been sent by me to your committee around the same time Mr Smyth sent in his comments in relation to rehabilitation. This deals particularly with serious offences. Yes, it deals with ensuring that criminals who commit these offences get a proper period in jail.
Once they get to jail, the rehabilitation is essential. That is certainly something the opposition has been very keen to see in terms of an ACT prison. I note that the government is stressing rehabilitation. We are very supportive of that. One of the reasons why we want to see good rehabilitation programs for drug offenders is to get people who have used drugs off the drug whilst they are in jail, rather than propose a needle exchange, which we do not see as being particularly helpful but as perhaps counterproductive. We are very keen to see rehabilitation in jail. That is exactly what Mr Smyth has been proposing. It is exactly what I support and every member of the opposition supports.
We also support a stronger stance in dealing with serious crime. It is a real concern in the ACT community that, when it comes to serious crimes, our courts simply are not tough enough. Provisions like this assist the court. It is not like we are imposing any additional conditions. Twenty or 30 years ago you had one page of the Crimes Act dealing with sentencing and all you would rely on in sentencing would be similar decisions perhaps from interstate. It certainly is something I remember doing when I started prosecuting
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .