Page 5352 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 16 November 2011
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that sentencing is a complex issue which involves questions of community expectations about punishment, how best to provide deterrence from a similar crime occurring in the future and the question of rehabilitation for offenders.
Because of this complexity, we believe that any reforms to sentencing demand a very careful approach which is guided by evidence, guided by research and guided by something more than a bit of instinct. Before any parliament approves changes to sentencing laws, it should be provided with evidence of how the change will better meet one or more of the seven purposes of sentencing. Parliaments need to be shown how it will achieve strong deterrence of crime, how it will achieve more effective rehabilitation or how it will provide a more accurate reflection of informed community standards. Sadly, this bill from the Canberra Liberals, which has the support of the government, is accompanied by no such evidence. Nor, I might add, was the attorney’s bill that we debated during the last sitting period.
The Greens believe that the Assembly can do so much better. We should be having an informed debate about what we can do to proactively address crime, rather than simply increasing sentences after the fact.
The Greens are not alone in holding the view that any changes to sentencing should be supported with evidence. Members will recall that when I last spoke on this issue I quoted from Civil Liberties Australia, the ACT Law Society and the Australian Lawyers Alliance, all of whom are open to changes to sentencing laws, but only if they are supported by evidence that the change will better achieve one of the stated goals. Since then we have seen a number of interesting articles appear in the press from senior Canberra journalists who have labelled the proposed legislation variously as “myopic” and “dog whistling”.
The Greens’ position is clear: we would prefer that the ACT perform a review of sentencing to gather evidence on how well sentences are meeting the purposes set out in the act. We believe that the evidence the review would provide would better equip the Assembly for a debate on sentencing reform. Unfortunately, as members well and truly know, our proposal for a review was not agreed to by either of the old parties, and we will have to debate this bill as it currently stands and without the evidence. When seen in this light, and without any evidence to support it, the bill should not be passed into law.
I believe there are a number of key flaws with the bill. The first, as I have touched on, is the lack of supporting evidence. One of the issues raised by this bill is community expectations about the level of punishment that should be handed out for certain offences. The Attorney-General and the shadow attorney-general have both formed the view that the current level of sentences in the ACT for culpable driving is out of alignment with community expectations.
The Greens believe that this is worthy of further investigation before the Assembly passes this bill. The question of what punishment the community expects in certain cases is an important one. The critical point the Greens emphasise is that it is informed community views that we should be looking for, rather than opinion based on the front page of a newspaper or some other perspective that does not take into account the full circumstances of the case.
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