Page 3921 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 1 December 2021
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convicted of child sex offences, enshrine a permanent firearms amnesty in the ACT, and increase the security storage requirements for security companies licensed to hold category H firearms. The bill supports our efforts to keep everyone in the community safe and to support our prosecutors and police in court and in the field.
The bill introduces reforms to enhance protections for children and the community by strengthening compliance with, and enforcement of, the reporting regime for registrable child sex offenders. The amendments to the Crimes (Child Sex Offenders) Act 2005 seek to ensure that offenders are held to account where they fail to abide by their reporting conditions, without reasonable excuse for that failure.
When registrable offenders who are subject to reporting obligations do not report to police as required, this represents a risk to the safety of children. Where appropriate, ACT Policing attempts to bring charges against offenders who fail to comply with their reporting obligations. However, police have concerns that a number of prosecutions have been unsuccessful due to the offender claiming forgetfulness as their reason for failing to report. The amendments reframe the elements of the offences so that forgetfulness alone, as a reason for failing to report, will no longer be grounds for acquittal.
To simplify the legislation, multiple offences for failure of a child sex offender to report in a range of different circumstances have been combined into a single offence for failure to report in any of those circumstances. The offence has been reframed in a human rights consistent way, including by providing that child sex offenders who fail to comply with their reporting obligations may be acquitted if they can demonstrate that there was a reasonable excuse for their failure to report.
The bill sets out criteria which the court must consider when deciding whether the registrable offender has a reasonable excuse for failing to report, such as the offender’s age, any disability the offender has, and whether the notice of reporting obligations was sufficient. Although strict liability offences engage and limit a person’s rights under the ACT Human Rights Act, particularly the right to be presumed innocent, the safeguards introduced to the offence ensure that the limitation is proportionate and demonstrably justified under the ACT’s human rights framework.
Measures which promote higher levels of compliance with reporting requirements by those convicted of child sex offences support the capacity of ACT Policing to protect the lives and sexual safety of children. I am sure everyone in this Assembly can agree that the wellbeing and safety of children are of the utmost importance.
The bill also introduces measures to reduce the risk of gun violence in the community. Amendments are introduced to the Firearms Act 1996 to enshrine a permanent firearms amnesty and ensure that surrendered firearms can be disposed of or destroyed without undue administrative burden.
People may be in possession of firearms without a valid licence or permit either through inheritance or where their licences or permits have lapsed. These “grey” market guns are not registered, are not traceable and may pose a high level of risk to public safety. A firearms amnesty encourages people to surrender firearms for which
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