Page 68 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 16 February 1993
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
He made no reference in either his presentation speech in December or his reply tonight to that very important principle about which I spoke in my speech, that question of the common law rights that protect the defendant's position in criminal proceedings. Perhaps he does not think that they are very important. Perhaps he does not think that putting them to one side is a matter of any gravity. I happen to think that they are important. I happen to think that taking this step is a matter of very great importance and significance to this Assembly and that we should weigh it up very carefully before we take it.
Mr Connolly told us at the very beginning of his remarks that I had indicated at the time of this Bill being brought down that I would broadly support the concept behind the Bill, and he was disappointed to see that I had apparently changed my mind. Can I make it clear that this Bill was delayed by a majority of members of this Assembly because they believed that it needed to be examined in more detail and more closely. Having done so, it is imperative that we bring any doubts, any concerns, we have about this Bill by force of that process to the attention of the Assembly. I have discovered such doubts and I have therefore brought those doubts to this Assembly.
I am sorry if Mr Connolly finds it unfortunate that I might say one thing on one occasion and, having had the chance to look in detail at the Bill, which I did not have at the end of December, when he wanted to rush it through this Assembly, come back with a slightly different view. I also point out that we do support the concepts espoused generally in this Bill. We are prepared to support the idea of extending the capacity of children to give evidence in court, uncorroborated and unsworn, but we do believe that it should not go as far as has been presented by the Government at this time.
Maybe after we have seen these changes working in the case of children between the ages of seven and 13 we should consider going further. We have not seen any evidence of it working at all so far. What has the Minister put before this Assembly to bring us to the same lofty position that he is now in of understanding on this higher plane that this is a law eminently successful, eminently designed to achieve much better things for the women and children of this Territory? Where are the studies the Minister apparently has access to that prove that point? I would like to have seen them.
Ms Szuty asserted that children do not have the capacity to keep up a deception. I frankly do not have any evidence one way or the other, whether they do or they do not, but I can say this: There are people involved in dealing with children in courts in this Territory who take a very different view from that, who maintain that it is possible for children to maintain deceptions, if you like, often because they do not know that they are deceptions, because they believe that what they are telling is the truth. I do not understand the complexities of how that comes about, but I suspect that if members took the time to talk to some of the people involved - not just defence lawyers but people involved in prosecutions in this town, in our own office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, for example - they might find that it is a rather more complex scenario than they imagined. There is, as Mr Connolly points out, a common law rule that requires a court to reject the evidence of a child if it believes that the child does not understand the need to tell the truth. As I indicated before, it is possible that a child will fully believe that it is telling the truth to a court but in fact not be doing so.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .