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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 13 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 4277 ..

These are the people to whom we are saying, "Report to the police or forget it" - the very people most in need of some sympathetic support, the very people in need of some scaffolded way into the justice system. Or is the Assembly saying that these are the people for whom we have no time, for whom it is simply bad luck, about whom it can be said that they brought it on themselves because they are scared of the police or their partner or their family? The working party and the Government's 1997 discussion paper also suggested that the requirement to report to police should not be compulsory. All community groups representing victims of crime have been adamant that other forms of reporting must be allowed.

Of course, given a bit more time and goodwill from all in the Assembly, it would be possible to include a rider in the legislation so that magistrates could take into account the reporting or non-reporting of an incident to police. But in the end it is more important that victims of crime report the incidents and seek assistance rather than some reporting to the police and others not reporting. If the intention, to quote the Attorney-General's media release of a year ago, is to broaden the reach of the scheme, I cannot understand for the life of me why reporting to the police has been made mandatory. I hope to get support for this amendment from the Assembly.

MR HUMPHRIES (Treasurer, Attorney-General and Minister for Justice and Community Safety) (3.10 am): The Government has asked that reporting be made part of the scheme, for the reason that I and court officials were grilled at length the other day by the Justice and Community Safety Committee about the extent of pursuit of those people who perpetrate crimes and who are liable, in theory, to pay money to meet the cost of paying victims. Mr Speaker, how do you expect the police to be able to pursue perpetrators for the purpose of getting money from them to pay victims if the police do not know who the perpetrators are, if the police have not had the incident, the crime, reported to them in the first place? With great respect, how can you simultaneously maintain that we have to be doing more to pursue the perpetrators of crime and in the same breath say, "No, you do not have to report the crime to the police."?

Let me make something perfectly clear. Reporting the crime to the police does not entail having to undertake some kind of traumatic encounter with the police. Reporting to the police is not a matter which is defined in any particular way. You could report to the police if you have been traumatised by a particular incident. Say you are a woman who has been raped, you are traumatised and you have the impression perhaps that the police are not very sympathetic to rape victims and tend to give them a rather hard time, treat them as the guilty party, and so on. That is a far cry from the operation of the sexual assault and child abuse team operating in the ACT. It is a very effective body that is very sympathetic to people who have been victims of crime in that particular category.

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