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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 8 Hansard (26 June) . . Page.. 2134 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

There are only two or three main amendments which I wish to make to Ms Follett's Bill. I believe they are necessary to improve the Bill in relation to that balance that I have referred to. They also have the great advantage of being uniform with the proposed national uniform legislation. They enable us more precisely to define the character of stalking and differentiate it from existing criminal law offences. When we come to the detail stage of the Bill, I will be very happy to outline the intent of each of those amendments. I think I made the comment when the Bill was originally tabled that there are inherent dangers in looking at amendments in the law in advance of work at the national level on provisions that are designed to achieve uniformity. This is a continuing problem which the Assembly needs to be aware of. It is, of course, the Assembly's absolute right to amend the law of the Territory in any particular category or field. However, it has also been the trend in recent years by governments from both sides of politics to wish to advance the question of uniformity through national agreements. In reaching national agreements and in working towards national agreements, it sometimes is the case that commitments are made and expectations are raised that certain provisions will be adopted in a particular way in advance of agreement by the ACT Assembly or, for that matter, other parliaments on issues in which they would naturally have a strong interest and, indeed, a prerogative to make decisions.

I have discussed this matter already with members of the Scrutiny of Bills Committee as we explore some way of providing access by equivalent committees on scrutiny of legislation in this and other parliaments to the process of formulating national legislation. For example, if the nine Australian governments were together at a table and agreed that certain provisions should appear in, say, the Crimes Act and then subsequently governments were to take back that legislation to their own parliaments and discover that it offended either principles of practice in the way the particular parliament or parliaments did their work or scrutiny of Bill principles in the sense that they abridged the rights of citizens, contained unacceptable elements of retrospectivity or whatever, then there would be a serious problem in the governments being able to implement the decisions that they had made with other governments.

This is an ongoing issue of difficulty, and we are, I think, far from establishing a satisfactory formulation. I will say that, generally, it is undesirable that we move in advance of particular national agreements where those agreements are imminent. I will say that in the ACT's context we know that there is extensive work going on in the field of criminal law reform to establish a uniform national code. I must say that I would have preferred that legislation of this kind awaited the formulation and the adoption of that national code, or at least the presentation of that national code in its entirety to the Assembly. The non-fatal offences provisions have been advanced to the next stage only recently, and this will be a very important stepping stone towards establishing uniform provisions in this country on the important offences which hitherto have been in some respects very inconsistent between different jurisdictions in this country. That, of course, is the object of the exercise - to remove that inconsistency.

I will support, as I have indicated, the legislation that Ms Follett has put forward. I indicate that it is desirable not to take this course of action, however, on a regular basis. We ought, as a matter of course, to work on the assumption that, where national agreements are being prepared, they should be allowed to be prepared. We have had to

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