Page 1617 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 12 August 1992
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We have to assess here what the most common kinds of penalties are going to be. When we set the penalties at a very high level it pulls up the minimum penalty as well. If you commit a certain offence, as prescribed in legislation for example, and the maximum penalty is $10,000 or one year in gaol, the penalty that the magistrate or judge imposes will be higher than if the maximum penalty was only $1,000 or one month in gaol.
Mr Kaine: Even for the most trivial offence.
MR HUMPHRIES: Even for the most trivial offence. That maximum penalty affects the scale of penalties that the magistrate or judge imposes. That is the point we are making. We do not believe that the scale of offences we are looking at here, even in the most vicious cases of negligence - vicious negligence, if you can have such a thing - is worth anything like one year in gaol. It is just not conceivable.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (6.02): Madam Speaker, I have been contemplating Mr Kaine's lovely little King Charles Cavalier which gets out. Of course that is a trivial offence. Contemplate, however, a dog with rabies that may be in a research institution. If it got out it would cause enormous damage to the community. What is an appropriate penalty there? What is an appropriate penalty for something that could cause great havoc to the community?
Ms Ellis: There are some cases where negligence cannot be condoned.
MR CONNOLLY: There are some cases where these penalties are appropriate. This is a silly argument.
MR STEVENSON (6.03): There are two cases that I think it is interesting to look at. In Ararat last year there had been a party opposite one of the circuses. One of the men had gone across about midnight and released the gate on the lions' cage. There were four lions in there. Two of them got out; the other two decided to stay in there with the door open. After four hours the lions were rounded up, and nobody was injured. I would suggest that that was a serious thing to do. Normally, retribution for that sort of offence may have been a bit quicker; but the fellow, I believe, was charged and convicted. That would come within subclause 11(1).
Subclause 11(2) could well be different. I think a case was reported on television in Canberra a few nights ago about someone who left his gate open and it ended up costing $160,000. Apparently a dog had got out. I did not get the full story; I heard just part of it. It must have been some form of compensation case under common law, or whatever. There is an absolute difference in intention there. With subclause 11(2), as Mr Humphries mentions, we are not looking at something that was done deliberately. Certainly, one could be negligent; but it is an extreme fine for negligence in that case. Perhaps it fits for the first case, but I would wonder about the second case.
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