Page 1942 - Week 07 - Thursday, 20 August 1992
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While there will no doubt be some press controversy over whether this shows a rising crime rate or a rising success rate in the police, the bottom line, which is shown towards the end, is that the ACT DPP is very successful. Of those matters where charges have been brought under the Crimes Act, a very high percentage resulted in convictions. Of the 5,523 charges against a much smaller number of defendants, in the last financial year some 4,078 convictions were recorded, with some 70 acquittals. Obviously one should never say that an acquittal means that someone got it wrong or something was not correctly done.
Mr Humphries: Or that a conviction means that they got it right.
MR CONNOLLY: A very high level of convictions would indicate a level of skill and expertise within that office and also good police work, laying the groundwork for the bringing of charges which can be sustained. While Mr Humphries makes the point, and we would agree, that it is always an option for us to go back to the Commonwealth, I suspect that that would be a difficult decision to make, and the practicalities would be against it. Of course any Assembly can do that and, subject to the cooperation of the Commonwealth, who may or may not want such a cooperative arrangement, we can always amend the Act again.
The purposes of this amendment are to clarify some additional powers of the ACT DPP that in the first year of operation gave rise to queries, and to clarify some of the cooperative arrangements, as Mr Humphries indicated. In effect, there are no binding financial arrangements for those cooperative arrangements. It will be, in effect, knock for knock; but if it becomes a problem we will revisit that issue. In so clarifying the respective roles, I think it is appropriate to remove the Commonwealth references throughout the Act. A future Assembly could, of course, revisit that; but, given the current view of the Government, and I take it from Mr Humphries's remarks that the view of the Opposition when it was in office was that we should proceed with a stand-alone ACT DPP, I suggest to Mr Humphries that we allow these amendments to go through. If we want to revisit the issue, we can always come back and do that.
In relation to the importance of an independent DPP, it is significant that a figure comes out in this annual report, and it was the first time I had seen this statistic: During the last 12 months, some 24 matters were discontinued by the DPP; that is, in the old terminology, nolle prosequis were filed. If we did not have an independent DPP, if we had the old traditional system, each of those matters would have required a political decision by the Attorney to discontinue a prosecution. That always brings the political process very close to the administration of justice. Had those decisions been taken by me as Attorney, I suspect that there would have been political controversy surrounding each and every one of the decisions. In fact, they were made by an independent statutory officer, and there was no public disquiet at all at the fact that some 24 prosecutions were dropped.
We also had the situation outlined in the report where a private prosecution had been brought by an individual, was taken over by the DPP, and subsequently dropped. Again, if we did not have an independent statutory officer exercising that function, had the Attorney-General or the Government had to intervene to take over a private prosecution and then drop it, I suspect that that would have brought the process into political controversy. The fact that that occurred
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