Page 1941 - Week 07 - Thursday, 20 August 1992
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Government to proceed in the near future to reverse the decision made some while ago to allow traffic offences to be dealt with as civil offences and to again make them criminal offences. I think that is a very wise decision and I support that move because of the technical difficulties it gives rise to under this Act. I will not say any more about that at this stage.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (4.39), in reply: It is perhaps appropriate that we are debating this Bill today because the first annual report of the DPP was tabled earlier this afternoon, and the background and history of the establishment of the DPP are set out very clearly in that report. The ACT is unique in Australia in that for over a decade - in fact, right back to the late 1970s - all prosecutions in this Territory have been brought by qualified lawyers. Since the late 1970s there has not been an independent police prosecution service where police officers bring the more minor charges - the situation that prevails in other States and Territories. It has all been done by qualified legal officers.
When the Commonwealth DPP was established in 1983 it took over ACT offences, and the ACT DPP was established by Act of this Assembly and came into operation in the middle of last year. Mr Humphries throughout his remarks was suggesting that perhaps we need to leave open the possibility of going back to us contracting or making use of the services of the Commonwealth DPP. That may be an option for a future Assembly, and doing the tidying up in this Bill by way of deleting references to the Commonwealth and making it clear that there are two DPPs, one the Commonwealth and one the ACT, with cooperative arrangements between them, does not preclude the Territory from ever going back into that cooperative arrangement.
However, there are substantial differences between the type of work and expertise in the Commonwealth DPP's office and the type of work and expertise in the ACT, and they are set out quite well at page 13 of Mr Crispin's report tabled today. Essentially, there is a very narrow range of crimes against the Commonwealth which the Commonwealth DPP's office prosecutes and in which its legal officers have developed considerable expertise. Essentially, they are offences against the Customs Act, frauds against the Commonwealth, social security fraud and that type of thing, or taxation matters. There is a very small number of matters that may involve offences of violence or theft, that very limited range of theft of Commonwealth property offences, or violence against internationally protected persons or people at Parliament House, for example.
The ACT DPP, on the other hand, has responsibility for that whole range of criminal law that is familiar in any other State or Territory. So the officers of the ACT DPP are developing expertise in the ordinary criminal law - murder, assault, rape, arson, theft - those common, State level criminal offences, and it is really a quite different area of expertise to run prosecutions for those types of offences. While what Mr Humphries says is correct - that in theory a future government could well decide to try to go back to a cooperative arrangement with the Commonwealth - I suspect that practicalities would be against that because of the different natures of expertise of the two services. The report of the ACT DPP tabled today sets out the way in which in the 12 months of operation of the office there has been real progress in further developing those expertises amongst staff of the DPP.
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