Page 170 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 17 February 1993
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amendments are. I might say that, for a Bill of this kind which is highly technical in many ways and which depends on there being some knowledge of the operation of the Magistrates Court to make sense of it, it is not particularly easy to follow. The presentation speech itself is very brief, very scanty, and shows some signs of being rushed. It would have been more helpful to have mentioned what other fairly significant parts of this Bill were all about when the Bill was being tabled in the Assembly.
Nonetheless, having gone through it, I must say that this Bill appears to enact a series of procedural improvements in the operation of the criminal jurisdiction of the court. For example, it very importantly supports and extends the operation of the VATAC scheme - the voluntary agreement to attend court scheme - which is, as members would be aware, an arrangement to replace the requirements to issue summonses and serve summonses in such a way that much court time is freed up and police time is freed up. It also, of course, similarly supports the pleas by post scheme which has been in operation for some time and which is an important way of dealing with much minor prosecution or laying of information in an efficacious and least costly way.
These two schemes, the VATAC scheme and the pleas by post scheme, are designed to minimise the resources that we are pouring daily into the criminal justice system and the way in which the courts operate in administering that system. I think any of us here need only to visit one of our local courthouses to realise that there are enormous resources tied up in the way they operate. Large numbers of police, in particular, are tied up every day in dealing with matters in those courts and it really is quite wasteful. I think there are much better uses of that time than sitting in a court. Most of the time they spend in that court is in fact idle time. It is not time that they spend actually dealing with court matters or with people as members of the public; it is time spent sitting around and waiting. These schemes have built up procedures for a better use of court time, not only for the police but also for magistrates and for officials of the court, and I think for that reason they could be described as very positive. I know that this is very boring for Mr Berry but he will have to put up with it. These are important reforms, after all.
There are some long overdue improvements in the operation of our criminal justice system in this Bill - on conviction and the levying of a fine or the imposing of a fine on a defendant in court proceedings. It has been the case, and it still is the case, that a defendant or an offender is ordered to pay a certain number of dollars - X dollars - or, in default, a certain number of days' imprisonment. At present that rate of imprisonment for a default in the payment of a fine is fixed at a certain rate - one day for each $25 of the fine. So if you were fined $200 and you did not pay that amount you would be spending eight days in gaol to make up your debt to society, so to speak. Unfortunately, the rate that we are presently charging in the ACT, one day for every $25, is not the rate which is imposed in New South Wales, where, after all, as the Minister pointed out, prisoners who are sentenced in ACT courts actually serve their time. It is appropriate, therefore, to adjust that amount to the New South Wales rate, and that is one day for every $100 of a fine imposed.
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