Page 1433 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 17 April 1991
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INTOXICATED PERSONS LEGISLATION
MR BERRY, by leave: I present the following papers:
Intoxicated Persons (Care and Detention) Bill 1991 -
Copy of letters from -
Mr B. Collaery, MLA, Attorney-General, to Mr W. Berry, MLA, dated 4 April 1991.
Mr W. Berry, MLA to Mr B. Collaery, MLA, Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services, dated 20 March and 5 April 1991.
I seek leave to have those letters incorporated in Hansard.
Leave granted.
Documents incorporated at appendix 1
INTERPRETATION (AMENDMENT) BILL 1991
Debate resumed from 20 March 1991, on motion by Mr Connolly:
That this Bill be agreed to in principle.
MR COLLAERY (Attorney-General) (11.17): This is an interesting proposal from Mr Connolly. Mr Speaker, the Bill put forward proposes to introduce penalty units to the Territory. That is another noble ambition, and I guess that a lot of people in this Territory who have been involved with the criminal law and the wider public have had that ambition for many years. It is not a new concept, but it is a concept that is in the minds of most criminal law reformists.
The vehicle that Mr Connolly has chosen is very simplistic - and I do not mean that in a pejorative sense. What he proposes to do is to insert a definition of a penalty unit concept in the Interpretation Act 1967. But it has no substantive presence in ACT law. It follows that Mr Connolly's Bill does not do anything as it stands. We can pass it, and that would be a figment and a symbol of our intent; but it will have no effect unless each penalty provision in Territory legislation - and there is a shelf of it in the room behind you, Mr Speaker - is amended to refer to penalty units.
The Government Law Office was formed following self-government and, of course, it was still being established when I became a Minister practically a year later. The Law Office has done preliminary work on this, but its advice to me is that it is going to take considerable time to
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