Page 3943 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 23 October 1990
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
leave town to attend these State Attorneys-General meetings. They never attended one meeting and they piously went to the press and said that they never travelled. The fact is that when they could sneak out of town and bolt down to Melbourne for a radio interview they did so on the public purse. So we see the penalty units thing being evolved as a brilliant new idea. It is not. As Mr Moore indicated, it has been around for a long time. It is currently being worked on by the Law Office, which could have been cranked up seven months earlier, for that matter, on the issue by policy direction from a government which failed dismally to govern, particularly in the legal area.
MR STEFANIAK (9.12): Before I get into my substantive speech in support of this very necessary Bill I would like to clarify a number of points made by Mr Moore and Mr Connolly. Firstly, as a member of the Scrutiny of Bills and Subordinate Legislation Committee, I am heartened to hear the comments made by the Attorney-General in relation to one of the points Mr Connolly made and look forward to his response in relation to that.
Mr Moore, this is not a revenue Bill. This has been on the agenda for quite some time. To say that it was introduced at about the same time as the budget and that has some relevance is really rubbish. Mr Duby, in answer to a question I asked him in March, indicated that instructions had been given for this legislation to be drafted. It is something I have been very keen to see since the start of this Assembly because the penalties have not been changed since 1983.
This Bill is not about raising revenue; it is about deterrence - deterrence pure and simple. I am pleased to see in Mr Duby's press release that he will be monitoring the effect of the increased penalties, and he issued a warning that further increases could ensue in the future. I still believe that perhaps the fines are still a bit too low in certain circumstances for certain offences. They are still the lowest in Australia, but they bring us much closer to Victoria and New South Wales. A number of people who come to Canberra and commit traffic offences are pleasantly surprised when they find that the traffic infringement notices are so very cheap here compared with elsewhere. Indeed, I recall talking to a number of police during the Summernats over the January period. A lot of the people who come to that budget on paying a certain amount in traffic infringement notices and are pleasantly surprised when they see how cheap ours are because ours have not been altered since 1983.
Mr Connolly raised a number of points in relation to penalties. I would disagree with him in relation to what the public want. I think the public want higher penalties. They want higher penalties generally, and they want higher traffic penalties. The community is concerned about traffic; people are concerned about the road toll; people are concerned about bad driving. I think members in this
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .