Page 5960 - Week 18 - Wednesday, 11 December 1991
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I take Mr Collaery's point that it may be appropriate that in the future we look at some of the provisions in relation to the powers of the Public Trustee to deal with the property that is held. He mentioned cherries. I think he had in mind a recent media report of some stolen cherries. I recall, when I was an associate to a Supreme Court judge back in 1981, a matter involving some barramundi that allegedly had been poached. And wheeled into the courtroom in Darwin was a chest freezer chock-a-block full of the aforementioned allegedly poached barramundi. When you have property that is perishable, it does raise the question of how long it should be held by authorities before it goes off. So, that is something we may need to look at next year if there is a problem.
The Scrutiny of Bills Committee has indicated a number of problems and I am seeking to deal with those in the amendments which I have circulated and foreshadowed. With the indulgence of the Assembly, I will, in the in-principle stage, just run through them quickly, perhaps to save time later on. The first amendment merely picks up a typographical error. The second amendment makes it clear that, where there is a power to search with consent, a standard form of consent should be signed and executed by the person whose premises are being searched. That will save time at a later trial. The third amendment I will leave for the moment. It deals with the issue of the time of the search warrant. The fourth amendment is, again, intended to make clear powers of consent and a clear form of consent.
The Scrutiny of Bills Committee said that this legislation does in some cases reverse the onus of proof, and that is true; it does that. But I think this is a case where it is justified. Essentially, what is happening here is that the state is saying, "When there has been major crime" - and we are essentially talking about drug crimes in the past, but I think increasingly we will see major corporate fraud also caught within this net - "the onus is on you to say how you got the asset".
Mr Collaery related an anecdote about a constituent who had been arrested for an infringement of the narcotics laws of some type or another and who happened to have $15,000 in his back pocket and who said, "But, officer, I won it on a horse". That is reminiscent of the evidence that we were hearing before royal commissions in Australia back in the 1970s, where a number of people seemed to have been remarkably successful, winning hundreds of thousands of dollars on a horse, but they were never able to remember the name of the horse.
It always struck me, as a person who is not a gambler and who occasionally will have a ticket in a sweep at Melbourne Cup time, that if I ever won $200,000 or $300,000 on a horse I think I would have a photograph of the horse framed in the loungeroom, let alone not remember its name. But that was the case in those royal commissions. It made
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