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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 11 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 3334 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Changes in circumstances are also capable of being picked up by the system as it now stands. A person who was, say, employed at the time they faced the court but who has now lost their job and cannot afford to pay the fine has the capacity to seek from the court a change in the way in which their penalty is administered. They can seek generous time to pay or they can seek a deferral of the commitment. All sorts of arrangements can be entered into, and regularly are, by the courts of this Territory.

We are not dealing with people of the kind I have spoken about. The Opposition's proposals benefit those defaulters who simply refuse to pay the fine imposed on them by the court. Using community service orders as an alternative to imprisonment as the option of last resort would undermine the whole purpose of the scheme, which is to encourage payment by those fine defaulters who are able to pay their fines. The threat of imprisonment is a significant incentive for most people to pay an outstanding fine. Under the Government's scheme fine defaulters who resist paying face the certainty of imprisonment.

If the Opposition's amendments succeed, fine defaulters will know that the worst thing that might happen to them if they resist all the other attempts which have been made beforehand - like suspension of drivers licence and so on - to make them pay their fines is that they will have to perform some unpaid community work. Given that we are dealing with some people in this category who play the system, who actually work out the way they can least painfully deal with their outstanding debts - some will have quite substantial outstanding debts - it is often the case that people faced with the option of a community service order will say, "Great, terrific! I will be happy to work off my fine under supervision with a CSO". I predict, and ACT Corrective Services predicts on experience in other contexts, that people who can find their way through the minefield of the earlier penalties imposed by the court will use the CSO scheme to avoid imprisonment.

This scheme is designed to get people to pay their fines. If, effectively, we remove the sting of the threat of imprisonment, which is what the CSO arrangements Mr Stanhope proposes would do, because a person would be able to rely on doing community service as an alternative to imprisonment - - -

Mr Hargreaves: You should have come to the prison and had a look, too.

MR HUMPHRIES: I have been in lots of prisons. I have been in more prisons than you have, Mr Hargreaves. I am sure I know all about prisons. I know it is a new experience for you but I have plenty of experience of that kind. If we inject the CSOs into these arrangements, we will lose the capacity to recover fines. By the time we get to the level of CSOs and imprisonment, if people are going to go to those stages, the Territory will have lost its chance to recover the money. If people are determined not to pay the fine, then the Territory is obviously not going to recover the fine.

We have to have a disincentive at the end of the line so great that it will encourage not everybody but most people to pay their fines. If people see at the end of the line that instead of prison there is a CSO to serve, then clearly some people, some of the harder cases I spoke about before, will choose not to pay the fine and to use the CSO scheme to avoid paying. (Extension of time granted)

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