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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 9 Hansard (4 September) . . Page.. 3018 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

The wording that Mr Moore has used here does not change the existing discretion of the court. They can get their licence back if they have exceptional circumstances. That is the situation now. If you get your licence taken away and you can establish to the satisfaction of the court that you are somebody special and you have exceptional circumstances, you get your licence back. That is exactly what Mr Moore is saying here.

Mr Moore: Let us do away with the courts altogether.

MR KAINE: No.

Mr Moore: Yes. That is what you are saying: Let us do away with the courts altogether. They are a nuisance anyway. They actually let people off, damn them.

MR KAINE: I have already pointed out that there are lots of other reasonable people, who fall under section 11B, who we say should be entitled to have their licence restored under special circumstances. But not these people. We believe that there are certain classes of offenders - certain classes of people who have been convicted of an offence - who should not be entitled to get their licence back. But Mr Moore, Mr Whitecross and Ms Horodny are about to hand them back their licence as though they had never done anything wrong. They will, no doubt, continue to front up and get their licences back, just as they have done in the past, because we are not giving the magistrate any different guidance from what he had before.

Mr Speaker, the only other matter about Mr Moore's proposed amendments is that all but one deal with this question.

Ms Horodny: Mr Speaker, on a point of order: Mr Kaine keeps stating that people go through the court system and come out the other end with their licences intact. I suggest that he stop saying that, unless he can actually table some evidence.

MR SPEAKER: There is no point of order.

MR KAINE: Mr Speaker, I do not have it with me; but I can table the evidence that, of 1,200 people last year, 450 got their licences back. That is a statistical fact.

Mr Moore: They did not have their licence intact; they had a special licence. That is an entirely different thing.

MR KAINE: I can table the document, but I do not happen to have it with me now.

The only other matter to be dealt with in Mr Moore's amendments is his amendment to clause 10. That has to do with the requirement that we would impose on drivers to have their drivers licence with them at all times when they are driving. I do not believe that that is an unreasonable expectation. At the moment, the police pull them up by the side of the road; they have committed some offence; the policeman says, "Show me your drivers licence", and they say, "Sorry, I do not have it with me". So, the policeman takes the

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