Page 3171 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 18 August 2009
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will actually do what they could do under the law” is not how we should write laws. Many people receiving infringement notices will not challenge them in court, particularly if they are young people. There will, therefore, never be additional judicial scrutiny of these cases and it is inappropriate to rely, as I said, on officers just routinely not enforcing the law.
I believe these bill posting laws will probably be breached regularly, particularly by young people, and often they will be breached by mistake rather than by a deliberate act. Young people are likely to be disproportionately impacted by these laws. They often use bill posting to communicate and they are commonly organisers of political rallies and protests.
I note that the ACT Human Right Commission believes that the bill imposes significant limitations on the rights of young people, and these are rights which we are obliged to protect under the ACT Human Rights Act as well as international treaties to which Australia is a party.
My dissenting report therefore recommends that the government remove the strict liability element from this bill. It also recommends that, prior to enacting strict liability offences, the government undertakes a thorough social impact assessment to assess the social consequences on particular groups and to ensure that the proposed offences will operate fairly.
I also want to point out that the bill posting offence in this bill would apply broadly to all types of bill posting. I particularly want to point that out because this bill has been in some cases promoted incorrectly. In particular, when the Chief Minister introduced the bill he stated that community notices about such things as lost pets would be excluded from prosecution under this legislation. That is not the case. It is likely that in fact they will not be prosecuted, but they are not actually excluded from prosecution. I am concerned, and the Greens are concerned, that this misinformation is likely to cause confusion and may result in unwarranted prosecutions.
One of the main new elements of the bill is a clean promotion duty. I do accept that bill promoters need to take some responsibility for the promotion of their events but there are problems with this part of the bill. The first problem is that it does not differentiate between the different types of promoters or the different bill posting material. It is clear from the Chief Minister’s comments to the Assembly, which Ms Porter also alluded to, that the bill was primarily intended to stop widespread illegal bill posting by commercial enterprises. But the bill will cover not only them. It will also cover community, political and social groups.
The second problem is this: it makes someone criminally complicit for another person’s crime without necessarily having to demonstrate close involvement or intention. In my view, criminal penalties are not warranted under these circumstances, particularly as we are all aware of the potential problems with criminal convictions for people’s ongoing lives. I have therefore recommended that the clean promotion duty should only apply to event promoters who are promoting an event as part of a business for profit-making activity.
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