Page 1534 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 18 May 1993
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That is particularly so in this case because the choice of paying the fine as opposed to going to court is enhanced by the fact that by paying the fine a conviction is avoided, whereas if a person takes a matter to court and the offence is found to be proved the person then has a criminal conviction against their name. This is an attraction, obviously, to guilty people; but it is also an attraction to innocent people, because those people may prefer the convenience and the lack of trauma entailed in paying rather than fighting. This is an issue, Madam Speaker, of major importance in the operation of this Bill.
For this reason we have recommended - this is the last recommendation of the report, but it is perhaps one of the most significant - that the Government give consideration to the establishment of a computerised information system for recording criminal convictions and all infringement notice offences. This is because it is essential that the Assembly and the Government have accurate information about the way in which these offences are being administered under the new scheme. It would be quite unacceptable for us not to be able to trace, for example, a very large increase in the number of people being charged or being prosecuted under this system as a result of it coming into force and therefore not tracking the rise in the use of these particular provisions in the Crimes Act against individuals in our community.
The system, on top of that, will be in need of an administrative framework. The system supporting the charge arrangements at present and the system supporting traffic infringement notices at present are both unsuitable for the use proposed in this Bill. They contain different information. They are for a different purpose. The Australian Federal Police have suggested that a considerable investment would be required in computerised information systems for recording infringement notice offences as a result of this Bill. They suggest that the order of expenditure will be in the vicinity of $300,000. I do not think Mr Moore foreshadowed that when he introduced his Bill, but it is an issue which is being properly raised as a result of the Bill's introduction. It has also been suggested that just a handful of charges at present are laid under these seven Acts. The figures were not very clear. They suggested somewhere in the vicinity of a maximum of 200 offences per annum in the ACT. I think we would all agree that that would be a very small number of offences to justify an outlay of $300,000.
I might point out, Madam Speaker, that there is an infringement system already in place in the ACT in respect of criminal offences. That is the system put in place to accommodate the new cannabis arrangements which the Assembly passed last year. Notices under that system are called simple cannabis offence notices - SCONs, for short. SCONs are issued by the police now in respect of those cannabis offences, but they are very small in number and would not be suitable as a basis on which to proceed with this larger system. Those notices are handled presently through a manual system, not through a computerised system.
It has been suggested, in this case by the Australian Federal Police, that the concept be expanded to cover not just the seven offences referred to here but a large number of other offences sufficient to justify the outlay of $300,000, or whatever the figure may well be on close analysis. The logic of that submission is hard to resist. That sort of bid for resources and for additional scope in this legislation would have been predicted by Professor Fox of Victoria, and it does present us with a number of problems. The committee has recommended that
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