Page 375 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 17 February 2015
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will provide greater certainty to both the Community Services Directorate and JACS and ensure consistency when providing support to juveniles who may be transitioning to the adult system. This is essential to ensure the appropriate people and agencies are involved in the support and management of the young person.
The amendments add an example of when the Sentence Administration Board might reject a parole application under the Crimes (Sentence Administration) Act 2005. The addition of an example in this section will both assist the Sentence Administration Board in guiding their decision making and, perhaps more importantly, offer clearer guidance to detainees seeking to appeal those decisions or reapply for parole when they have not made any tangible changes towards addressing the reasons for previous applications being denied.
I also support the clarification to the Crimes (Sentencing) Act to ensure that a victim impact statement may be presented to the court in the form of a picture or drawing. This is already a current practice. Pictures or drawings can, of course, make a powerful statement and can be an important way for some people, particularly children, to express themselves. A good example that I have seen and that I am sure other members have seen is not from a court but pictures drawn by asylum seeker children whose drawings express the sadness and trauma they experience while held in detention.
The Australian Human Rights Commission’s forgotten children report was tabled last week. It interviewed over 1,000 children held in detention over a period spanning both Labor and coalition governments. It showed there were 233 recorded assaults involving children and 33 incidents of reported sexual assault. It talked about how children are being detained indefinitely on Nauru and are suffering from extreme levels of physical, emotional, psychological and developmental distress and it presented pictures that have been drawn by the children—pictures of crying children’s faces, families behind bars, pleas for freedom.Turning to the issue of voyeuristic conduct, the bill also proposes two new offences for the ACT’s criminal law which would prohibit certain types of voyeuristic conduct. One new offence is for observing with a device or capturing visual data of another person where the content observed or captured is, in all the circumstances, an invasion of privacy and indecent. Examples include behaviour such as using a phone to record in a change room, streaming live data of a person in circumstances where they could reasonably expect to be afforded privacy or taking photos of other people having sex.
A second offence is for observing with a device or capturing visual data of another person’s genital or anal region or female breasts when a reasonable person would, in all the circumstances, consider the observing or capturing of visual data to be an invasion of privacy. This offence addresses behaviour called upskirting or downblousing, a practice where recording devices are used to surreptitiously film under women’s clothing. Unfortunately, this is occurring more frequently now due to advances in recording technology.
There are some very interesting human rights issues that are raised by these new offences and members will have seen that the scrutiny of bills committee have raised
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