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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 13 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 4248 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Finally, the article quotes the tribunal's director of victims services, stating:

money recovered from offenders -

I table that report, for the interest of members. Mr Speaker, the concerns being expressed in that article by Mr Tony Stewart, the Labor chairman of the committee in New South Wales looking at criminal injuries compensation, about where the New South Wales system is heading are almost exactly the same as the concerns that the ACT Government has put on the table today. What it tells us, Mr Speaker, is that if Mr Stanhope and his colleagues were sitting in the New South Wales Parliament they would be doing exactly what we are doing today over here.

Mr Stanhope: No, we would not.

MR HUMPHRIES: You would, Mr Stanhope, because you are a member of a party which is supporting that very process in New South Wales. Are you going to cross the floor, against your party?

Mr Stanhope: I would be leading the party, Attorney. I would be Premier and I would not allow them to do it.

MR HUMPHRIES: I see. I invite you to pursue that ambition, Mr Stanhope, and perhaps leave us to other erstwhile leaders or putative leaders in the ACT. Mr Speaker, the fact is that if they were in New South Wales they would be pursuing the same reforms. Indeed, if they were in government in the ACT they would probably be pursuing reforms because that is what they were doing last time they were in government in this Territory, pursuing reforms of exactly the same nature, to rein in the burgeoning cost of criminal injuries compensation.

I wish to make a couple of brief points before closing. We are told that retrospectivity is unacceptable; yet it is strange that members of this place had no difficulty earlier this year in retrospectively reapplying criminal liability to people associated with the hospital implosion. The one piece of comfort I took from that decision of the Assembly was that at least I would have a strong case for saying, "If you can recriminalise retrospectively, then you can remove a civil cause of action retrospectively, at least". It appears that the members who took the view that retrospectivity was perfectly acceptable in that more heinous example now find it very hard to follow the same lead in a later situation of a very similar nature.

Finally, I want to make reference to the comment by Mr Hargreaves that more effort needs to be made to collect money from perpetrators. Indeed, there is some justification to that claim; perhaps more effort does need to be made. Let me make one small point

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