Page 1946 - Week 07 - Thursday, 20 August 1992
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ACT Assembly say, "We will appoint the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions our Director of Public Prosecutions". A Commonwealth government, Labor or Liberal, whatever it maybe in seven years' time when the current appointment runs out, would have to agree to do that. Even if we decided today to do away with it, we would have to negotiate it with the Commonwealth Government.
The provisions that provided for that, in effect, interim arrangement are no longer of relevance if a fundamental policy change is made in the future that we do not have a separate prosecution service, and that goes to some fairly fundamental self-government issues. The maintenance of the criminal law - Mr Humphries, I am sure, would agree, if he has not said so in one of his various press releases - is one of the more fundamental responsibilities of any government. If we are going to suggest that we will not do that any more, that we will flick that back to the Commonwealth, it is a fairly fundamental policy reversal which can be debated in a future Assembly.
At the moment, the ACT DPP has been appointed for a term of some seven years. We are clarifying throughout this Act the various responsibilities of the ACT director and the Commonwealth director. The provisions to allow for a single Commonwealth officer to exercise both the Commonwealth functions and the ACT functions are no longer relevant, and it is unnecessary verbiage to have in the Act. We are cleaning out the Act; but it does not prevent a future Assembly from changing its mind and putting them back in again, subject to a future Commonwealth Cabinet agreeing to accept such a responsibility. There would be a real issue as to whether, having divested itself of responsibility for law and order in the ACT and the criminal justice system and the courts, which have just transferred over, any Commonwealth government would want to take it back again.
MR HUMPHRIES (4.57): Madam Speaker, I know that I cannot win this because I understand that Mr Moore is not coming back to the chamber today and that therefore the amendment cannot possibly pass. However, I am going to go down fighting anyway. Two things need to be said. First of all, the Attorney is wrong when he says that this was a transitional provision in the Bill. It was a part of the view of the Government that put the Bill in place in the first place. It was not a transitional arrangement. It was a reflection of our Government's view that it might be a suitable way, at the end of the day, for the ACT to conduct its affairs.
My party remains of the view that we should not assume in each case that the ACT needs to reproduce every facet of State or Federal government activities within our own separately defined ACT public service structure. There are some occasions when it would be more sensible to contract out certain services, and sometimes a party to whom those could be contracted out would be the Commonwealth Government. It has a very large level of expertise in these matters, and I believe that it can provide and could provide in certain cases valuable resources for the use of the ACT.
I cite an example of this very thing. The Opposition is currently considering the drafting of an electoral Bill for the ACT. I know that the Government has not got around to this yet, so it will not know what sorts of issues are at stake here; but one of the questions is whether the ACT establishes its own electoral office or uses the Commonwealth Electoral Office, as it has for the last two ACT elections
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