Page 2750 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 14 August 1991
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jurisdiction that they would prefer to have additional powers. But that is not, in my view, a ground for the Assembly necessarily wanting to give them those powers, unless we are to forget about any balancing of powers and liberties and just go all out for arbitrary power. I am sure no member of this Assembly would accept that.
The problems that have been identified with the move-on powers are those identified by Magistrate Dingwall in dismissing two charges in 1990, which led to the law being interpreted in such a manner that a move-on direction must be given against individuals, not against groups. If you have a group of people acting in what the police apprehend to be circumstances that would justify the use of the power, you have to give a direction against each individual person. The police explain that that means that the power is of limited practical application.
They also point out that the legislation does not stipulate how far a person must move on or for how long. They say that in practical terms a person has complied with the request if he or she moves only a few paces for a few minutes. The legislation is a very blunt instrument. That bluntness is highlighted by those comments from the police force. We would say, from the Labor side, that the essential bluntness of it is that it is arbitrary in that it gives a police officer power to move a person on without having to justify a specific offence.
The last time this was debated I went through the earlier police report which was referred to my predecessor as Attorney-General, Mr Collaery, in April 1990. I think that was the first substantive move-on report, and it remains a useful document because it sets out in a fairly extensive attachment circumstances in which the police had used the move-on power. Those circumstances, in each and every case, disclosed facts that would give rise to one or more substantive offences.
When a number of minor public place offences in the Police Offences Act were repealed in 1983 by the Police Offences (Amendment) Act of that year, it did not mean that Canberra in some way became a haven for petty criminality. When those provisions were removed, other more specific and less serious offences were created at the same time. When those public place offences went in 1983, the Crimes (Amendment) Ordinance of that same year, which was passed as a package of legislation, provided a range of powers for offensive or disorderly conduct in a public place. For example, section 546A of the Crimes Act provides:
A person shall not, in, near, or within the view or hearing of a person in, a public place behave in a riotous, indecent, offensive or insulting manner.
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