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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 11 Hansard (8 December) . . Page.. 3292 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

of about $4.8m on criminal injuries compensation. The volume of claims which have come in already so far this financial year is such that we would confidently predict that the scheme would pay out at least $9m this financial year if the reforms we have proposed were not effected from the date on which we announced that they should be effected.

Mr Deputy Speaker, what is going to happen here is that the matter is going to go to a committee. The committee will report, according to this motion, by the middle of next year, by which stage there will be claims in the pipeline, some of them not dealt with but many of them dealt with, which will add up to a bill, on our estimation, of over $9m for that financial year. The report of the committee, presumably, has to be acted upon by the Government and even if the changes are, in fact, followed through and implemented by the Assembly at the end of that time, there will still be 12 months of people who have slipped through the net after the Government announced that it was going to make those changes.

That, I think, is quite unfortunate. What will happen is that either the deadline we have imposed in our announcement will be effective, so that anybody whose claim has not been dealt with by the time the legislation actually comes into effect will lose out on their right to get a cash payment in terms of the old scheme, or, if the government scheme is bounced altogether and, for example, the Assembly decides to stay with the present scheme, that $9m burden will have flowed through the system, presumably with people continuing their claims, and that very serious burden will fall back on the taxpayers.

We are not alone in Australia in proposing reform to the criminal injuries compensation system. Such reforms have already been effected in Victoria. Recently, New South Wales announced major changes to its criminal injuries compensation scheme. Mr Deputy Speaker, even the former Labor Government of which you were a member announced significant reform to the criminal injuries compensation scheme during the last 12 or so months of its life. Everybody has acknowledged that the scheme is growing to be a much different beast from the one it was originally conceived to be. They are also acknowledging that there is considerable rorting going on of the present criminal injuries compensation scheme. New South Wales recently drew attention to a large number of rorts that go on in that jurisdiction which they want to crack down on in changes to the scheme there. So, we cannot avoid the need to reform this system.

We also need to be sure that this process of referring it to a committee will not lead to a whole succession of special pleadings going on by people who want to preserve a particular area of their own which they benefit from under the present scheme. I note particularly that the main pleaders in the present debate have been lawyers, particularly those lawyers who have a lucrative practice in criminal injuries compensation claims, an area, I might point out, for which costs are not generally awarded by the court, which means that the level of scrutiny by the court over the process of taxation of costs, that is, assessment by the court of the fairness and adequacy of costs, is not as for other matters. I understand that people can be charged between $1,500 and $10,000 to have criminal injuries cases handled through the courts. I am concerned about that. One of the reasons we have proposed change is to make sure that the emphasis on the role of lawyers is decreased and we move more towards a system where people receive appropriate care and counselling for the harm they might receive from a criminal act.

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