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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 11 Hansard (8 December) . . Page.. 3309 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

I address these comments particularly to Ms Tucker, who is not here. The advice from the Australian Federal Police and from my department is that in a two-hour period it may not be possible to comply with the provisions of the law. Do not forget that in that two-hour period it is necessary to get from the scene of an incident to a police station with a person who is detained; to have a sufficiently senior officer or competent officer to make the application; to brief that person, as the Bill is currently drafted, him or her, on the application being made; to then locate the judicial officer that you want to get to make the order itself; to satisfy any concerns which that officer may have in respect of that particular application; to convey the necessary information back to the officer; to obtain the order; to write the paperwork and then to serve the order on the person concerned. It may not be possible to do that within two hours.

If it is possible to do it within some lesser period than four hours, obviously the order is made in that time and the person is released, because the legislation does not require that a person be detained for a total of four hours come what may. They are to be detained for four hours if that is necessary for the order to be served. On that last point, the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General has put forward a model for draft domestic violence laws for national application, and in the case of that model no upper limit on the period of detention was proposed. In other words, it was proposed that a person should be detained for as long as it takes to be able to obtain an order from a magistrate or judge and then have it served on the person who is in detention. There is a case for that as well.

Mr Speaker, I think it would have served members opposite well to have gone and consulted with some of the groups who are working at the coalface in this area to see what they thought about the efficacy and fairness of provisions of that kind. The police are strongly supportive of these measures, as one might expect. They have to deal on a day-to-day basis with domestic violence matters and they want to make sure they have the power to offer real protection to people who are in serious trouble.

The views of the Domestic Violence Crisis Service and the Women's Legal Centre for the ACT and Region were also sought. Both organisations supported the legislation, generally and specifically, and indicated their view that it is important that there is a means of ensuring that service of an order can be effective.

I have to comment on Mr Stanhope's remark, not today but on the earlier occasion when this was being considered, when he said, "Well, if a person is thought to have committed some offence which may constitute domestic violence, they should simply be arrested". I hope Mr Stanhope realises that that is not an option in many cases; that a cast-iron case necessary to bring a prosecution at law cannot always be sustained on the basis of evidence presented by one party to an incident of domestic violence. It is appropriate in those circumstances that you not launch a prosecution if you cannot follow it through. Equally, it is extremely important to make sure that a person has protection by way of a protection order in appropriate time and that it is served on a respondent in a timely way. That is what this legislation is all about. I think, frankly, it is simply nonsense to suggest that an alternative course of action in these circumstances is to go out and arrest the person against whom it is alleged some domestic violence has been threatened or has actually been perpetrated. That is simply utter nonsense.

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