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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 13 Hansard (3 December) . . Page.. 4295 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

The question is how and where it should be focused. Half of the principle upon which I was driving was that this actually makes for a situation where people who are least able to afford to pay are the ones who are paying.

Further, Mr Humphries suggested that it is a user-pays system. It is those who commit crimes and are convicted - not the people who go through the court, which was the term Mr Humphries used for the people who are convicted - who wind up paying under this legislation. They are convicted of criminal acts. Of course, on many occasions those criminal acts of which they are convicted have nothing to do with a requirement for paying compensation. In that sense, it will often be misdirected; and that is why I raised the issue before, Mr Humphries, about interfering with judicial independence and how the method should be seen to be done. What Mr Humphries ought to be doing is withdrawing this legislation now, going back and working out a system in consultation with the broader community, particularly the legal community, if he wants to go down this path, to have a separate structure from the penalty so that the magistrate or the judge has the opportunity, first, to impose a penalty; and, secondly, to impose a level of compensation.

When I talked about a range of levels of compensation, I was not suggesting that we somehow make it that you have to pay $20 if you have committed an offence under section 27 of the Crimes Act, or whatever that is, and $30 for another one; rather, we should give an overall view, the same as we allow the judiciary to establish an overall penalty. We should say, "The maximum penalty" - we always fix maximum penalties - "is $2,000, so many penalty points, or whatever". Similarly, a magistrate or a judge could say, "Yes, there is a compensation level necessary here." - they would know what the maximum compensation level is in any particular instance - "Therefore I impose, firstly, the penalty; and, secondly, the compensation penalty".

There is a range of different systems which are much more socially just but which meet the criteria that you answered with. I think what we have here is an inadequate system that undermines the judiciary and the magistracy and undermines social justice, in that it is specifically focused on people who have the least ability to pay. It is simply a revenue measure. There is no question about that, and Mr Humphries has identified that it is a revenue measure. The only thing that Mr Humphries pretended to justify in terms of the revenue measure is this idea that at least it is user pays. If you feel that it is appropriate to use the user-pays system - and I can see there is some argument for that - then let us genuinely have a user-pays system. This is not a user-pays system because it focuses on some of the people - - -

Mr Humphries: I did not say it was user pays; I said it had elements of user pays.

MR MOORE: Mr Humphries interjects and says that it has elements of user pays. Okay. Well, use the elements of user pays and let us come up with some better legislation instead of this half-baked idea, because that is what it is. It is a half-baked idea. The half-baked idea is illustrated by Mr Humphries saying to us, as an aside, "The reason we could not consult in advance - we never do on revenue measures - was avoidance". Yes, that is true; that is normally the reason you do not consult on revenue measures.

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