Page 714 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 1 April 2008
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relate to a specific site. Under this legislation, if the site in question is in, say, Gungahlin and there is no legal community noticeboard, the person placing the notice would be breaking the law.
It would have been useful to have had more advice from the Attorney-General on this matter via a response to the scrutiny report, but, unfortunately, there has not been a response to date. My office has been informed that the Attorney-General will provide a response when he gives his speech to the bill, and that might be when he closes the debate. What good is that to us? We should have had that information before today’s debate so that adequate time could be taken for its consideration. If we were not under a majority government, I doubt we would be having this debate without having first seen the government’s response, but such it is that the government can and will use its numbers to push things through without following due process.
When passing this bill, it would be of assistance to the community if the Minister for Territory and Municipal Services or his department not only examined ways to provide more legal community noticeboards in Civic, and, I might say, every other shopping centre in the territory—I have not done a survey, but I do not imagine they all have accessible community noticeboards—but also provided a TAMS webpage outlining where notices can legally be placed, as currently occurs for legal graffiti sites.
I totally support the Attorney-General’s commitment to a 12-month review by the ACT Chief Police Officer and the Commonwealth Ombudsman. I hope to see the terms of reference for the review include the impact that this legislation has on young people, the incidence of fine default and the rate of imprisonment for fine default. Evaluation of new initiatives does not occur often enough, and I hope that the next government, given that it will be the seventh assembly, will have learned from experience and have the courage to make any changes required to deliver effective and human-rights-compliant regulations for street offences, because it will be the next Assembly that deals with that 12-month review.
I want to thank Mr Stefaniak for his initial concern in bringing this matter to the attention of the Assembly. However, I believe that his bill goes too far towards enforcing civility in our society. To quote from the 1997 Community Law Reform Committee report on street offences:
… it is the proper response of citizens to nurture civility. It is appropriate for citizens to express disapproval of actions which appear to breach civility. However, one should be very cautious before arming and requiring the law to enforce civility.
Of course, I will be speaking to Mr Stefaniak’s amendment during the detail stage.
Finally, in relation to alcohol-associated street offences, I note that the ACT government will soon be conducting a review into the Liquor Act. Of course, the public accounts committee is conducting a review into the Auditor-General’s report on the enforcement of that. I support the Attorney-General’s recent announcement that the government will introduce mandatory responsible service of alcohol training
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