Page 5260 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 15 November 2011
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somewhat in that they will not try and sneak through significant or controversial amendments in the name of an omnibus bill. From what we can tell, this bill does not do that. It is good to see the government have got that message and finally appear to be treating their omnibus bills in this way. As a result of that, the Canberra Liberals will be supporting this bill.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (10.38): The Greens will be supporting this bill today. It makes relatively straightforward amendments to 10 pieces of law. The changes are minor but will make the lives easier for people who are covered by the various laws that are being addressed in this bill.
One of the changes is the amendments to the 2010 unpaid fine legislation. Since the law commenced last year an operational difficulty has arisen about whether unpaid fines could be listed with a credit reporting agency. The government have resolved this issue by removing the relevant parts of the legislation so that the power to list no longer exists.
The Greens support this approach because the credit reporting aspect was only a small part of the overall scheme and it is better to make the laws clearer and less ambiguous. This will make the laws more easily understood by the people who enforce them and the people who are bound by them. There are a range of other amendments that improve the laws in different ways. They all work to make the ACT statute book clearer and more effective. The Greens support the remainder of the bill.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development, Minister for Territory and Municipal Services and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (10.39), in reply: I thank members for their support of this bill. This bill is part of a series of legislation that concerns the Justice and Community Safety portfolio and it is about improving the statute book of the territory. The bill amends a number of acts—the Crimes (Sentence Administration) Act, the Fair Trading (Australian Consumer Law) Act and the Road Transport (General) Act. The amendment to the Crimes Act arises from the new legislative scheme for the enforcement of court fines introduced in 2010.
As part of the scheme a new chapter 6A has been inserted, setting out the legislative framework for that scheme. Section 116N contained within chapter 6A requires courts to report to a credit agency a defendant’s failure to pay a fine, or to default on an arrangement to pay a fine by instalments. This was intended to ensure that a person’s fine default was recorded by credit agencies to ensure that failure to pay court-imposed fines had consequences that encouraged people to take fine enforcement seriously.
However, there have been difficulties identified with the implementation of this provision which were not anticipated. Since the new scheme has commenced, negotiations with credit reporting agencies have highlighted uncertainty as to whether unpaid fines represent the kind of information that should be disclosed to a credit reporting agency. The office of the commonwealth Privacy Commissioner has since indicated its view that a fine is probably not a loan within the terms of the commonwealth Privacy Act and is therefore ineligible to be listed on a credit report.
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