Page 4705 - Week 16 - Wednesday, 28 November 1990
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police have forever been telling youngsters to move on. In effect, we have formalised what has always been an informal procedure. Under the police directions in the manual that we have insisted be kept, they are required to keep effective field notes and full records of how and where it was used.
I concede that the Act is in the process of judicial interpretation. Magistrate Dingwall, as I recall it, has recently held in a case that the power should not be used in a group situation; it should be used only for an individual direction. I am sure the Opposition is delighted to know that there is a potential loophole in the Act. In other words, where there are 150 people outside a show, and three or four fights going on but only two or three constables in attendance, you cannot get a loudhailer out and say, "Could you all get back inside the doors" or "Go back to your cars" or "Go home".
On this interpretation, which I am still examining from a legal point of view, with the assistance of the Law Office, it appears that we may have to amend the Act if we want to give the power to make a group direction, or accept the fact that it can be used in only a one-to-one situation. That is yet to be resolved both in government and in this Assembly. If it comes back to this Assembly, I am sure that we will have the helpful contributions of those opposite. But I implore the Opposition to try to see this power for what it is. It is a fairly mute power to the police to encourage them not to make those arrests with which Mr Connolly seems to be content.
I accept that Mr Connolly has not practised in the criminal jurisdiction, and I say that with collegiate respect; but I do say to him that it is my very strong personal conviction that we needed to move away from the old concept of insulting language. We often need to give the younger constables, particularly, a slightly thicker skin in dealing with situations.
If, in balance, we empower them to ask groups to move on, and if, with the inquiries that I conduct constantly and the liaison that I have constantly at the youth centre and other places, I do not receive substantive complaints from the youth justice coalition and other like-named groups, then I am content at this stage to stand on this Act. I commend the police for the work that they have been doing to date to break up potentially violent situations, because that is what the Act is predicated on.
Recently on a front page of the Canberra Times we saw evidence of a dreadful tragedy. A blow was struck in one of the drinking holes here, and that left someone a quadriplegic. This is a development made for a community-based police force that has a community sensitivity. I commend the present law to the house. I do not support the proposed repeal of it and a return to the nineteenth-century legislative base which Mr Connolly supports but which I do not.
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