Page 1945 - Week 07 - Thursday, 20 August 1992
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Notwithstanding subsection (4), the Executive -
obviously the ACT Executive -
may appoint the Commonwealth Director as the Director.
That is, the ACT could appoint the Commonwealth person to act in the place of an ACT person. The Attorney is quite right to say that his Government has confirmed the view that it wants to have an ACT DPP. The Alliance Government took the same view: It was a good idea to have an ACT DPP. But what exactly do we achieve by ruling out the possibility of change in the future? I think this is a sensible move in the present circumstances. We are, however, experiencing continuing severe reductions in Commonwealth funding for the Territory. The budget, of course, is a few weeks away; we will see what transpires from that. But nobody who has sat in the Treasurer's chair on the Treasury bench in this Assembly could deny that every stone must be turned over to see whether savings cannot be made.
Perhaps in the course of events in the next 10 years no government will decide to save money by, as it were, co-locating our ACT DPP in the Commonwealth office. By the same token, it may be that a government might, and, if there is the possibility that that will occur, it would seem to me to be sensible to leave open that option. Leaving these amendments out, that is, leaving those provisions in the existing Act, makes very little difference to the shape of the final Act. It probably adds about a quarter of a page in extra verbiage - hardly anything - and it would provide us with the flexibility to do this properly in future. It would save a future government - maybe a future Labor government - from having to bring forward, if it wished to, an amendment Bill to put back those provisions. We lose nothing by leaving them there. We certainly lose something by taking them out.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (4.55): Madam Speaker, the Government would disagree. The provisions in the Act that allowed the Commonwealth director to act as the Director of Public Prosecutions for the ACT were very much there by way of interim measures to allow matters to proceed smoothly when the agreement with the Commonwealth for DPP services ran out - in effect, when the ACT assumed responsibility for the criminal law on its own behalf and until such time as we appointed a director. We may have decided not to do that, but we did decide to do it. We appointed a director for a period of seven years.
Any decision to go back to some cooperative arrangement with the Commonwealth is highly unlikely to save money, because the Commonwealth DPP does a completely different set of things. There would be hardly anyone in the Commonwealth DPP's office with experience in prosecuting sexual offences, common assaults, break and enters. They are not the sorts of offences that are dealt with in the Commonwealth office. They are developing their expertise in tax and fraud and Customs Act matters. Apart from that, you would be paying at the same rate of money for doing the same thing, so there is no financial saving. It would be a fundamental policy question as to whether the Commonwealth would be prepared to accept responsibility. We could not simply by Act of this
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