Page 3705 - Week 12 - Thursday, 13 October 1994
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on compensation. The presence or absence of any of these factors will not necessarily be conclusive in determining whether a person may be awarded compensation. They are factors for the court to take into account in exercising its discretion.
In requiring the court to consider whether a person has been prosecuted for an offence, new section 8A is not referring to private prosecutions but rather to an official prosecution instituted by or on behalf of the Attorney-General, the Director of Public Prosecutions or a police officer authorised by the Chief Police Officer to institute prosecutions.
Clause 8 has been proposed by the Government in an attempt to reduce the amount of criminal injuries compensation which is currently being awarded. The committee report indicates at page 5:
... submissions and witnesses before the Committee strongly argued that the seriousness of an offence is not necessarily related to whether it is prosecuted. It was argued that if the Government wants to set some minimum standards for the seriousness of offences covered by the Act, it should use a standard directly related to the offence or injury. One suggestion was to increase the minimum payable compensation amounts. The Act currently sets a minimum of $100.
Further, at paragraph 2.11, the committee's report states:
Decisions on whether to prosecute may be dependent on factors which may have no bearing on the seriousness of the offence, such as whether the offender is a juvenile, the record of the offender, and the likelihood of a conviction. The proposed amendment, in effect, could give some discretion to the police as to whether a person may be compensated for a crime and may influence the police's decision whether to prosecute a matter.
The committee also spent some considerable time examining clause 9 of the Bill. The committee did support one change to clause 9 of the Bill. It is the very minor change that Mr Humphries alluded to earlier. The explanatory memorandum says:
Clause 9 also removes an unnecessary reference in section 9 of the Act to death arising from the use of a motor vehicle. That reference is unnecessary because compensation is not to be payable in respect of any injury arising from the use of a motor vehicle whether or not the injury results in death.
A number of other issues in relation to clause 9 were raised by witnesses at public hearings and through submissions. These are explained under a number of headings on pages 5 and 6 of the report. Two relevant headings are "There is no demonstrated rationale for treating certain types of injuries prejudicially other than to reduce pay-outs" and "Prescribing classes of injuries as not compensatable should be dealt with by Act rather than regulation".
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