Page 1654 - Week 05 - Thursday, 11 May 2006
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The government’s Crimes (Sentencing) Act 2005 and the Crimes (Sentence Administration) Act 2005 were drafted to work in union with the government’s corrections management bill. I intend to introduce this bill later this year. It will be a bill that provides a modern legal framework for the remand centres and for the new ACT prison. To maintain continuity between the existing custodial laws and the foreshadowed corrections management bill, the Sentencing Legislation Amendment Bill provides transitional arrangements to enable the existing custodial laws to apply until the corrections management bill is passed and commenced. These transitional arrangements enable the courts and the chief executive of justice and community safety to make decisions to resolve unforeseen contradictions between the new laws and the old laws. If necessary, regulations can be made to resolve any temporary contradiction.
I note that Dr Foskey has advised the Assembly she intends to propose amendments to the bill to enable people who default on fines to work off the fines via community service rather than by imprisonment. The government agrees with the principle behind Dr Foskey’s amendments. However, solving this problem is not as simple as it first appears, and the government is concerned that the amendments proposed by Dr Foskey would create more problems than they solved. If the problem could have been solved in the way proposed by Dr Foskey, it would have already been put in place through the Crimes (Sentence Administration) Act 2005.
The ACT has two systems of imposing fines: court-imposed fines and fines imposed by infringement notice, such as traffic fines. At present, there are at least 131,000 outstanding infringement notices, the bulk of them for traffic and parking offences. Under the court system, there are around 2,100 fines imposed per year. Infringement notices can also lead to court-imposed fines, as the people who are issued infringement notices have a right to challenge the notice in the Magistrates Court, and the government may also initiate prosecutions instead of proceeding with an infringement notice.
In contrast to fines, the kind of community service administered under a sentence in the ACT is designed for offenders who have been liable to serve imprisonment or are serving imprisonment or periodic detention. A comparison between the numbers of fines I have mentioned and the number of community service orders managed by ACT Corrective Services demonstrates the vast difference between these types of penalties. In comparison with the figure of 131,000 infringement notices outstanding and 2,100 court fines issued, in the 2004-05 financial year corrective services managed only 124 community service orders, and this year they will manage 173.
If just half a percent of the people who are fined were to shift to existing community service orders, the increase in workload would be four times the current level. That shift would simply be unsustainable. The ACT has a fine enforcement scheme under the Magistrates Court Act which is administered by the registrar of the court. The scheme enables the registrar to examine a person’s financial capacity to pay a fine if the person defaults. The registrar can make arrangements for the person to pay by instalments, to allow extra time, to garnishee the person’s wages or to claim some of the person’s property to pay for the fine. The court’s registrar has advised that there are between 600 and 700 direct debt transactions in place as a consequence of the fine default
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