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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 11 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 3333 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Having made the offer to Mr Stanhope during the previous debates to sit down with the Government and work out how we could come to some mutually acceptable position to be able to achieve his goals within the framework of having to save some money out of this new arrangement, it is disappointing to see that these amendments have come forward without that consultation either with me or with ACT Corrective Services. We now have an arrangement which suffers from exactly the same problem that the earlier amendments did in June.

I accept that there is a principle that Mr Stanhope wishes to put forward here, but the fact remains that it comes at a cost. That cost is the cost of the entire reform package which the Government has put in place, a package which took something like a year-and-a-half to two years to engineer and put to the Assembly and have passed. I would plead with members not to lightly set aside the effect of those reforms. That is what we will do if we adopt these arrangements.

Mr Speaker, there is a second issue here. That is the principle relating to having community service orders available to people, as they move through the enforcement process after being fined by a court. I would argue that the proposals would not benefit people who are too poor to pay or who have forgotten to pay, because the scheme we have already put in place, as of June this year, already has mechanisms to ensure that the poor or the forgetful are not imprisoned. There is absolutely no reason why people in either of those categories should face imprisonment under the arrangements already in place.

We are not talking about those people when we talk about these provisions. We are talking about people who, for a variety of reasons, choose to play the system and not pay their fines because they reckon they can get away with it or because they believe that some options cannot be enforced against them or even in some cases because they believe that serving some time in prison is a good way of being able to work off a fine. In those circumstances, we have to ask ourselves whom we are dealing with. As I say, we are not dealing with people who are poor and cannot afford to pay the fines or people who have just forgotten to get around to putting their cheque in the mail.

A fine defaulter who becomes liable for imprisonment would have been sent a penalty notice, a default notice and a notice of the suspension of his or her vehicle registration or drivers licence, if they have one, and the court would have found that he or she is financially capable of paying the fine. That is very important to remember. The court would have made an assessment at the time the fine was imposed which said that the court had heard the evidence, had heard what factors the fined person, the defendant, had mentioned in mitigation of their penalty and said, "What are your financial circumstances? How long do you need to pay any fine we impose?". That is taken into account by the court in imposing a fine. We would have a court order made by a magistrate or a judge which says, "You are liable for this amount of fine, based on the gravity of your offence, based on your financial circumstances and based on your own submission about how long you need to make a payment".

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