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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (3 December) . . Page.. 4506 ..

MR WOOD (continuing):

Mr Humphries indicated that an arrest is a fairly complex matter. A single arrest can take one or two police off the beat for an hour or more, which is quite a time, and we would certainly prefer to see those police out there on the streets where they were sent. If it is a street offence, that arrest is made at a time when those police are needed on the streets. So there is some superficial attraction to an on-the-spot fine. It seems a simple solution. We have seen it operating with some measure of success in respect of PINs and TINs, cannabis and other things, so it is certainly worthy of consideration.

The concept of on-the-spot fines, and the range of fines, has grown over recent years. Now we have the ones I have mentioned, plus dog control, litter and wildlife, so it is growing. It indicates that at least some members of this Assembly have given support to that principle over time. But there are some concerns about it. This type of administrative fine is exactly the sort of fine that was originally prohibited by that very famous Bill of Rights. That being the case, you can see that there are quite serious issues at stake.

At the more mundane level of its effect on citizens of this town, there could be the perception, as there sometimes is with traffic and parking fines, that it is simply a revenue raising measure. When it comes to the more serious offences, the street offences and that type of problem, that is something we would absolutely have to avoid. There is also a perception, or a fact that we would have to avoid, that it could be overused by police. Police may expect that the recipients of those on-the-spot fines would automatically pay. These could be given out and police could fill out their performance sheets, or whatever they are called, with quite a range of things. It could be made to look quite impressive and it could become abused.

I think the basic question remains: Do the police need these powers? That is something I want to give more thought to before this Bill gets into the detail stage. Of course, a very significant fact about any charge by police against a citizen is that that citizen can contest it. Certainly, they can do that with the on-the-spot fines. It is a very good principle to hold to and one we should not bypass very easily. When a person is taken in charge and all the processes have been gone through, that affords certainty of process, and I would be reluctant to get too far away from that.

It is also the case that on-the-spot fines are not always an option. Take the riot at Parliament House. I do not imagine that any police there would have been in a situation, with the public disorder, to give out an on-the-spot fine. It simply could not be done. I think, in a related demonstration or some other demonstration, they tried to give on-the-spot traffic fines for car drivers who were blowing horns very persistently, and they found that that could not be done. So we have to realise that on-the-spot fines cannot always be delivered.

If an aim of on-the-spot fines is to be more efficient and to keep the police on the beat, that is good; but what about later in the process? When Mr Humphries comes back next week with his amendments I would like to see him come back with some statistics and tell this Assembly how many traffic on-the-spot fines, parking on-the-spot fines,

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