Page 1615 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 12 August 1992
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MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (5.54): Madam Speaker, the tactic that the Liberals are adopting here in every case, and it is taking an inordinate length of time, is to take an offence, conjure up the most absurd situation at the lowest end of the spectrum and then say, "Is it not appalling that we have a one-year penalty?". The equivalent of that would be to say, "Let us consider this: It is a hot day and a young lad who is walking home from school has not had a drink. There is a peach tree with ripe peaches. The young boy reaches across and plucks a peach, a nice, ripe peach, and has a bite to eat".
That is the sort of heinous offence that some of us may have committed at some stage in our distant past. The penalty, Madam Speaker, for that young boy who has taken that peach, is 10 years' imprisonment, in the Liberals' view, because stealing carries a maximum penalty of 10 years. It is absurd to say that that is how the law would respond. It is the same issue. This style of argument is simply silly.
To take subclause 11(2), the extreme example would be the very dangerous animal, the tiger, wilfully and negligently not properly caged, that bursts out, as one did recently in Sydney and had to be shot. But what if the animal had killed half-a-dozen kids? We have a penalty that is appropriate for a range of offences. It is absurd to pick the lowest extremity and then say that the maximum penalty is absurd, just as it is absurd to say that the penalty in the Crimes Act for stealing, at 10 years, is too high, because a boy stealing a peach from a tree should not be given 10 years' imprisonment.
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (5.56): Madam Speaker, I suspect that the Attorney-General is the person guilty of absurdity in this debate because he has postulated a proposition that, under this Bill, cannot take place. We have already banned tigers and wild animals from the ACT. So there can, under no circumstance, be an animal - - -
Mr Lamont: No, we have not.
MR KAINE: Oh, I see. You envisage, despite this, that we are going to have tigers confined in small cages in zoos.
Mr Lamont: No.
MR KAINE: That is what you just said. We do not have any zoos in the ACT, other than the one up on Mugga Lane, and I do not imagine anybody having any tigers or lions or elephants up there. So it is an absurdity. The other point is this: He quoted the case of the schoolboy who steals a peach. There is a major difference. That is a wilful act of theft. This is clearly a case of overlooking something, not a deliberate and wilful act. They are two entirely different things.
Since we have successfully banned wild animals that are likely to cause serious damage to people, what we are talking about here is the release of a domestic animal. If somebody overlooks the fact that they did not put the latch on the gate properly and a domestic animal escapes, are you going to send them to gaol for a year? It was not a wilful act but an act of forgetfulness - something that somebody simply has overlooked. That is what this envisages.
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