Page 3816 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 8 November 1994
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MR MOORE (5.18): Madam Speaker, in rising to speak to the Crimes (Amendment) Bill (No. 3), I would like to take up a particular issue, rather than raise the matters that Mr Humphries has already gone through, appropriately. On that issue, I have circulated an amendment, and I will speak to it in the detail stage, if we consider the Bill as a whole. We have a situation here where, when Mr Humphries introduced his Bill, a Minister talked about the end of civil liberties and about how society, as we know it, was going to come to an end, as our freedoms were going to be slowly whittled away. Then we see a Bill like this, which requires only a very small amendment in order to protect those civil liberties.
Madam Speaker, I imagine that other members have been approached by the Civil Liberties Council and others to raise this issue of the police officer being able to ask for a name and address. As I understand it, none of us has a problem, where a series of offences are considered to have been committed and there is reasonable evidence of that, with a police officer asking for a name and address. It is very important to make that clear in the first place. What we have here is a situation where, a police officer having asked for a name and address - I will refer to the extreme case - a very young person, maybe 14 or 15 years old, has the right to ask the police officer in return for their station and number. There is no real balance in that power situation. The power is almost entirely in the hands of the police officer.
Madam Speaker, that is why I have proposed an amendment which says, "Let us make this apply just to serious offences". According to the advice given to me, if we use the word "indictable", if we find that it is an indictable offence, then the Acts Interpretation Act indicates that we are talking about offences where there is a penalty of imprisonment for a year or more. So, we are talking about only quite serious offences. Any other issue where a police officer can ask for your name and address provides a power against which the Labor Party in this Assembly has taken a stand on a number of occasions. Certainly it is, in one sense at least, similar to those move-on powers that they have strenuously opposed, because those move-on powers give an uneven balance to the relationship between the police and the community. The irony of this matter is that it comes at a time when our Attorney-General, our Minister for police, has managed to encourage the police to undertake a very effective community policing system. We see example after example of the police growing with the community instead of working against them, and that is where we are likely to see results.
As we give police more and more power, we are much more likely to set up a situation of conflict rather than an approach of working together. This is an argument that Mr Connolly himself has put time and again. That is why, when I originally proposed this amendment, I went to Mr Connolly and said, "I want you to consider this amendment very carefully". I know that Mr Connolly has given it due consideration, because he responded by saying that he would go back through it, look at it and consider whether it would be a suitable amendment. Madam Speaker, in foreshadowing the amendment, I shall try to encourage members of the Assembly to have particular thought for young people in Canberra in a situation that arises very occasionally, which could be handled by having a positive relationship with the police - it is usually handled by a positive relationship - instead of by the temptation for a quick fix, for a police officer to say, "I demand your name and address".
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