Page 3701 - Week 12 - Thursday, 13 October 1994
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would have to have occurred before there could be a successful claim for compensation. Again, the committee felt that the original intention of the legislation - that is, to compensate people who were genuinely injured by acts arising from criminal activity - should not be subverted. The committee felt that it was inappropriate to change the direction of the scheme in some way to limit this compensation to serious and violent offences. Madam Speaker, certainly we would all hope that injuries resulting from serious and violent offences would always be capable of receiving compensation under this legislation; but it is, I think, something of a leap in logic to suggest that that was the original intention of the legislation and that it is, therefore, important to somehow restrict claims to serious and violent offences. That is not what the legislation says, and I would respectfully suggest that that is not what the legislation means. There are a number of other provisions in the legislation which the committee had difficulties with.
Having said all that, the committee was anxious that steps be taken to prevent unacceptable and unwarranted kinds of claims being made. Some of those sorts of claims were drawn to the attention of the committee. For example, it was suggested that, where a person had caused or contributed to their own injury through their own criminal activity or through being intoxicated or being under the influence of alcohol, there ought not to be a successful claim on the public purse. There were a number of cases put before the committee where, in the last few years, individuals had gone to a nightclub or an evening drinking spot, had become intoxicated, had woken the next morning to find themselves injured and had made a claim, on the assumption that they must have been injured through the criminal act of somebody else. That is possibly a fair assumption, but one which is not greatly illuminated by their own conduct. As a result, the committee recommended that people in those circumstances should not be eligible for compensation unless it could be shown that, being in that state, they had not contributed to their own injuries. It was also recommended by the committee that, where a person was unable to identify the assailant or person responsible, through criminal conduct, for that person's injuries, the person should have to prove beyond reasonable doubt - that is, the criminal onus - that a particular offence had occurred and the injury had resulted from it.
Not surprisingly, it was also suggested that the Territory ought to have the right to medically examine a claimant for criminal injuries compensation. Extraordinarily, at the present time, there is no such right for the Territory to do that. The committee readily agreed that it should be possible to compel a person to engage in such an examination before they receive compensation. There are a few other minor matters which the committee recommended. Madam Speaker, we have not treated this legislation entirely negatively. We have rejected the thrust of the initial Bill; but we have recommended that there be other changes which, we believe, will have the effect of limiting the number of unwarranted cases of criminal injuries compensation being paid at the present time in the Territory. I have to say that the number is relatively small at the present time. The committee has made it clear that we feel that we need to monitor this situation with care, to ensure that, in the future, if the floodgates that the Government has alluded to do start to open in some way and if there is a large volume of applications being made on an unwarranted basis, then we should return to this question and seek to limit them, if we can identify the principles under which people ought not to be eligible for compensation.
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