Page 6073 - Week 18 - Thursday, 12 December 1991
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that any decisions on remissions would be subject to some public scrutiny, and any government or any Minister that seeks to capriciously tamper with such a power does so at their peril. We have seen Ministers come to grief on such a matter, so we are well aware of the sensitivity there.
I would also like at this stage to refer briefly to the amendments foreshadowed by Mr Collaery. As a general matter, the Government would not think that in a specific amendment to the Crimes Act it would be appropriate to, in effect, piggyback on a substantial amendment that is referring to a different section of the Crimes Act and which perhaps ought to be dealt with in private members' business. Mr Collaery had proposed a private members' Bill to overcome the difficulty of a recent High Court authority of the Queen v. S, where three convictions against a father for carnal knowledge were quashed on the basis that the indictments relating to the charges were insufficient as to details of the offences. Of course, that is often a problem with young victims of assault; they are not able to give sufficiently precise details.
Queensland and Victoria have recently enacted legislation to overcome those difficulties. I can tell the house that the Criminal Law Consultative Committee of the ACT is intending to bring forward a package of reforms or comment on a package of reforms in ACT laws relating to sexual offences. Mr Collaery proposed the Crimes (Amendment) Bill (No. 3) in an attempt to solve that problem. The Government had some concerns with the way he had gone about it. I directed my officers to have a look at his proposed solution and come up with perhaps a better solution that addressed the problem of the Queen v. S and essentially picked up some of the experience of other States in resolving this question.
I had that ready and the Government was proposing to support that, in private members' business yesterday, with the appropriate amendments. I provided our amendments to Mr Collaery in advance of yesterday's debate and he has had the advantage, I think, of those amendments to modify his original Bill and come up with the amendments that have been circulated.
It is a bit late to establish a general practice in the last couple of sitting days of the First Assembly, but certainly in future Assemblies it generally is not desirable to piggyback amendments to a separate section of the Crimes Act to a Crimes (Amendment) Bill, given that this is addressing a problem in relation to child sexual assault and given that the Government was doing some work on this in any event. We may as well take the opportunity. The Government is happy to support Mr Collaery's amendments which, in the form in which they now reach the house for debate, do resolve the problem and make a worthwhile contribution to the law. So, the Bill, as amended, rather than addressing one problem, will address two.
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