Page 565 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 10 February 2009
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letters off. As a matter of fact, after the attorney tabled the bill, I wrote to a reasonable subset of the people on his list.
I have to go back to the briefing and make it perfectly clear that I did ask the question, “What was the consultation?” The answer I was given was the one that I related before, “We had an election, Mrs Dunne.” My response to that somewhat tongue-in-cheek, smarty-pants response was: “Is this then an exposure draft?”, to which I was told, “No, Mrs Dunne, this is not an exposure draft. This is what the government intends to do.”
In the consultation that I have undertaken—and it seems to reflect pretty much the consultation that Mr Rattenbury has undertaken—the advice that I have received in writing from Civil Liberties Australia and from the Bar Association and the advice that I received in a meeting with the Law Society expresses a degree of concern about this. I do know, for instance, that the Bar Association wrote to me with a view. It has been represented to me by members of the bar that that is not a unanimous view of the Bar Association and that there are other individual members of the bar who would hold a contrary view. This is why we are now in the process of referring this matter to a committee for proper inquiry, for proper discussion, about what is the community standard and whether the form proposed by the government meets the community standard and meets the needs of the community.
I think it is rather ironic that the attorney, when he cannot get his way, starts bandying around suggestions that those people who dare to thwart him today are being conservative. I think it makes strange bedfellows that Mr Rattenbury of the Greens and the Liberal Party are collectively lumped together as conservative. And it is clear that, in doing that, what the attorney was doing was basically venting his spleen. He did not listen to the words that I used when I said that it is never the case that we close the law books and say, “It cannot get any better.”
What we propose to do is ensure that what we do in the ACT is the best it possibly can be to meet the needs of the community, to meet community expectations, and that we do not do it just because it is done in other jurisdictions. For too long we have sat in this place and had people use this argument either one way or the other. But when it suits us—and I think all of us who have been here for some time have fallen into this trap—we say, “We should go down this path because they do it somewhere else.”
We most often say, “We should go down this path because they do it in New South Wales.” If that is the case, we may as well just give up now and become part of New South Wales. This is not New South Wales; this is the ACT. The people of the ACT will have different expectations and different demands from the populace of New South Wales and this is why we should be having a proper inquiry. We should be looking at how academics look at this matter, how prosecutors can deal with this matter.
This is not to say that anyone in this place thinks that, if someone goes out and commits a violent act on someone and they die, they should not be charged with murder. We have to make sure that we get it right because there are many people who have said that surely the current construction of intent and reckless indifference should be sufficient if we can prosecute the matter successfully.
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