Page 3078 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 15 September 1993
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The claim from the Opposition again will be that the Government is soft on crime; that the Government is not prepared to respond to issues. Last year, when we had what appeared to be a rising spate of violence in Civic, the police drew to my attention the fact that there were problems with successfully prosecuting those engaging in fights in the Civic area. Often you had a group of people involved in a melee. Police would come onto the scene. If they were to prosecute for assault, the question was: Who is assaulting whom? If one person were charged with assault for being in that melee, would they be able to successfully demonstrate that they were simply responding to an attack or that it was consensual? If nobody in the group wanted to proceed with charges no charge could proceed.
The police said that that was a problem potentially affecting the safe passage of individuals through Civic because of fighting in a public place. This Government very swiftly responded by bringing in a new law giving police additional power to deal with the offence of fighting in a public place. I sat down with opposition members and with independent members and said, "This is what we are proposing as a fairly urgent response to a perceived public order problem". So, Madam Speaker, the claim from the Opposition that the Government is somehow soft on crime is shown to be hollow, because we have responded responsibly to issues of public concern.
Mr Moore has raised the issue that we may be able to be more responsive by dealing with some of these matters through an on-the-spot fine mechanism. That is something that an Assembly committee has been looking at very carefully. Where we draw the line in principle is that we do not support powers that give police or anyone else in authority this arbitrary power to pre-empt what may occur and say, "We do not like the look of you. We will move you on". Mr Humphries posits the question: "Can you show me that this power has been abused?". He says that unless the power has been abused it should stay. That is not the question. The question should be: Is it right in principle to give the police power to deal with citizens who have breached no law? We take the view that it is not right in principle to do that.
Mr Humphries is fond of quoting Sir Robert Menzies in this place. When we come to debate the "you will produce your identification pass" Bill, I will be quoting back at Gary Humphries some of Sir Robert Menzies' great quotes about traditions of English civil liberties and how the free blood of Englishmen marks our legal system in contrast with legal systems where the citizen is totally the subject of the state and is required to produce a pass. Indeed, my recollection, although I will have to check it, is that even the "forgotten people" speech made references to pass laws and the requirement to produce papers. Menzies came to prominence in the era of rationing and pass cards after the war and made quite a political statement about the way citizens should not be required to produce their papers. It is unfortunate that the Liberal Party tend to forget some of these issues of principle in their constant quest for populism.
Madam Speaker, these move-on powers are not found commonly in other parts of Australia. There is a specific move-on power in the Northern Territory. There is a loitering law in South Australia that can be and has been interpreted so as to give police some arbitrary powers to move people on. In other States in Australia there are loitering laws that are very restrictive. They apply only to persons who fall within the definition of loitering, which normally involves some
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