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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 2 Hansard (10 March) . . Page.. 534 ..

MR HARGREAVES

Let us look at a different offence altogether - shoplifting. If a bloke comes flying out of a store and hurls the stuff into a bin but is nabbed later on, the police are not going to arrest him, because they cannot. But they can require him to go and talk to somebody about it; in other words, take him into custody. You do not get a piece of paper at that time. This is the only time when you are supposed to get a little piece of paper.

Mr Smyth: But you do not have to have a blood test for shoplifting.

MR HARGREAVES: Why? It is because one magistrate has said to Mr Humphries, "I am going to make sure, as the people would like that". How many times have you been done for DUI, Minister?

Mr Smyth: Not once.

MR HARGREAVES: Then you would never have seen one of those documents.

Mr Smyth: That is correct; but if you are done, then you should be given the protection that the law should afford you until you are proven guilty.

MR HARGREAVES: There is no assault on your liberties at all in the non-filling-in of this document. There is none. It is the same as for any other offence. You are required to go and have this test. The test convicts you; this document does not. You are saying to me, Minister, that this test convicts you.

Mr Smyth: How many other offences have a two-hour time limit in which a test must be done? Name one.

MR HARGREAVES: There is record after record after record which says what time the test starts, the time the two-hour bit starts, which is what you are talking about. It is sitting there at the time. At the time you stop your motor car it is filled in. It is filled in whether you blow the bag or not. It is filled in and, of course, it is offered to the court in the parcel of pieces of paper to sustain the charge that the police have brought. The suggestion that no indication is given to the magistrate that the two-hour timeframe has been exceeded is an absolute falsehood; it is rot. The document I have displayed is a copy of that. Further justification of that is the fact that when a person has blown over the limit and is to accompany police to a station, the police contact the station to which they are going through the communications centre and it is recorded at that time that somebody is coming in. If anything, we have met the benefit of doubt with that; so, this is absolute rot. It is a furphy of the first order.

It is being said that one of the magistrates is going to call the police to the court all the time and just waste police time. That is absolute poppycock. I would be grossly disappointed with any magistrate who, given all of this information on which every other case is based, then says, "Oh, sorry, I'm missing this one sheet of paper which you haven't got the motorist to sign". How pedantic is that? That is being absolutely pedantic. There is no need to do that. I do not believe what Mr Humphries has said.

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