Page 1662 - Week 06 - Thursday, 13 August 1992
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Penalty Units
MRS GRASSBY: My question is to the Attorney-General, Mr Connolly. Yesterday in the house you said that you had taken steps to improve the system of penalties in the Territory's laws. Could you please explain how this will change?
MR CONNOLLY: Thank you, Mrs Grassby. It gives me the opportunity to apologise to the Leader of the Opposition. In debate yesterday, I indicated that, had the Leader of the Opposition been paying attention, he would have learned the answer to a remark that he made, and I was 24 hours premature on that. Yes, Mrs Grassby, the Government has made a decision to undertake a substantial review of penalties in ACT legislation in order to do what the Leader of the Opposition urged us to do yesterday - although we made the decision before that - which is to try to get some coherence and rationality into the system. There are pieces of legislation on the statute books in the ACT, in dusty, cobwebby corners, that have penalties of 10 pounds for certain offences. That is clearly absurd and inappropriate.
The thrust of this exercise will be, on the one hand, to get some logic into the scale of penalties so that like offences are treated in like manner, and, on the other hand, to make sure that those penalties have a continuing relevance by expressing them not in units of currency - $100, $1,000, $5,000, $10,000 - but in penalty units. It is expected that one penalty unit would be $100 initially and over time that $100 will vary to $110, $120 and so forth. It will mean that, from the point at which we finish the exercise, ACT penalties will have continuing relevance. We will not have a situation where an obscure piece of legislation sits away gathering dust and when it is finally looked at the penalty is found to be absurdly out of kilter with community standards. The 10 pounds penalty under the mining regulations leaps to mind as the most absurd example.
Secondary Colleges - Future Directions
MR CORNWELL: My question is to Mr Wood, the Minister for Education. Mr Wood, I refer to an issues paper, Future Directions of Secondary Colleges, which was put out for comment last year with this expectation:
At least an interim report would be provided to the education division by 31 March 1992.
I ask: Has this been done, and when might we have a report available for scrutiny?
MR WOOD: You will have a report shortly. I think this matter was raised in one of the weeks of the last sitting session. I think Ms Szuty raised the issue of high school development and I indicated that I will be tabling that document here shortly.
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