Page 1702 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 30 April 1991
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saying, it being chaired by former Supreme Court Justice Kelly and having the Chief Magistrate, Ron Cahill, as a deputy chair and other eminent lawyers on the committee - also has broad representation from people who are not lawyers.
I think there has been a tendency in law reform processes in Australia to set up bodies that are staffed exclusively by lawyers, however eminent. The process can often bog down into a procedure that for lawyers is fascinating, of digging away into arcane precedents and tracking down the antecedents of a legal principle. This is all interesting stuff and of great interest to lawyers, academic or otherwise; but it is sometimes of less relevance to the general community. It is pleasing that this committee has a balance of views and, if this report and its second report - which we will be referring to later on this evening - are any indication, then the community can look forward to being well served by the ACT Community Law Reform Committee. I obviously commend them on their efforts here.
Mr Speaker, the Bill is very short and to the point. It reverses the effect of section 556 of the Crimes Act. Interestingly, it was introduced in its present form in the 1950s in New South Wales; but it was introduced only in, I think, 1985 in its present form in the ACT. The present form gives rise to the problems, which, as I say, have been in that form for some 20 or 30 years previously in New South Wales. The Crimes Act, of course, is a New South Wales Act that has been introduced in the ACT and applies of its own force here, but it is modelled very closely on the parent Act in New South Wales. The problem with section 556, as identified by the Law Reform Committee, is that there may be circumstances where a person who lays a complaint to the police, which gives rise to a conviction for an offence against the criminal law, may be precluded from later seeking civil compensation for the same facts. The obvious example would be an assault that gives rise to both a civil action and a criminal action.
As the Law Reform Committee points out, that operates only if you actually lay the information, which is a technical term relating to the process of getting a charge going. It does not mean that if you are thumped in the streets and you go along to the Civic Police Station and make a complaint and lay the information, in the sense of giving police information about the crime which leads to a conviction, you will be precluded from a civil remedy. It operates only if, in effect, you initiate the prosecution yourself. That rarely happens; but there is the potential for it to happen, and it is clearly inconsistent with the broad thrust of modern approaches to criminal law which focus on the concerns of victims - an approach which has been enthusiastically adopted by the Opposition in this place and which the Government is now indicating it also has support for. I am pleased that there has indeed been a reference to this committee on that very subject. It is
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