Page 3590 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 25 August 2009
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courts and therefore do not warrant a change. This is common across all sorts of laws, all area of law, not only chalk drawings or Scouts who paint street numbers on gutters; it applies to people who write their street number on an ACT government garbage bin and, for that matter, people who post lost dog posters on a telegraph pole.
Significantly, it is also reflected in the Director of Public Prosecutions’ policy document which is publicly available on the DPP’s website. I urge the Liberals and the Greens to familiarise themselves with the prosecution policy.
I welcome comments received from the human rights commissioner on this amendment. The commissioner has stressed the importance of ensuring adequate protection is given to the rights of young people. It is firstly relevant to note here that on-the-spot fines for bill posting, as for graffiti, cannot be issued to a person under the age of 16 in the ACT.
The Criminal Code already absolves children under the age of 10 from any criminal liability or responsibility. The code imposes an additional evidentiary element for any prosecution of a child between 10 and 14. The prosecution needs to prove the child knew that his or her conduct was wrong. So the Criminal Code already protects younger people who may have committed an act where they had only a limited understanding of the consequences. And the DPP’s prosecutions policy also specifically recognises the care to be taken in considering whether a juvenile should be prosecuted.
This is an important amendment to protect the beauty of our city, to ensure events are promoted responsibly and to put adequate penalties in place for those that would, in full knowledge, cost our community by damaging public and private property for their own gain. I have pleasure in tabling the government’s response to the committee’s report. As I said, I thank members for their detailed consideration of this important issue.
MR COE (Ginninderra) (3.22): I think what we have seen today in this report, tabled by the Chief Minister, the highest ranking member of the government, is absolute rubbish. Here we have a Chief Minister whose number one priority is to spend 10 minutes reading out a rant about what I might or might not have done in a committee. Ten minutes, 10 minutes of his life, 10 minutes of the Assembly’s time, is spent on this report. It is pretty amazing stuff. We sit so few weeks a year, for three days, and yet the Chief Minister comes into this place and tables a report like this.
He goes on to say stuff like “his colleagues come down on him like a ton of bricks”. “What have you done?” they cried. “Go back and oppose, oppose for the sake of opposition.” This is a disgrace. This is the Chief Minister, the Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory, tabling a report like this. Can you imagine Mr Brumby tabling a report like this? Can you imagine Mr Rees tabling a report like this? What about Anna Bligh? Can you imagine what she would do?
What about Mr Barr? What would Mr Barr do? That is the question: what would Mr Barr do? What would Andrew do? That is the question you have got to ask over and over again now. That is the question. That is the question everyone in the Labor
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