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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 1 Hansard (15 February) . . Page.. 137 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

Mr Speaker, there have been a number of cases in which goods, particularly foodstuffs, have been tampered with, causing great alarm and stress throughout the community and losses obviously to the producers and retailers of the goods. The latest and best known case is perhaps the Arnott's Biscuit case, which resulted in great public alarm about whether the very popular - and I must say, quite lamentably, once Australian owned - biscuits were safe to eat.

There are existing offences, such as extortion and blackmail, with which the perpetrators of this type of crime may be charged; however, proving each element of those crimes can be difficult and jurisdictional problems may arise if, for example, the goods are tampered with in one State but offered for sale in another, or the demands of the perpetrator are made in yet another State. Given these potential difficulties, the Labor Party accepts that it is reasonable to enact this legislation and is quite happy to support it.

There is one point perhaps relevant to make in the context of that agreement; that is, that as a general principle of legal policy legislating for specific crimes in narrow terms, such as there are in this Bill, is probably not normally to be recommended. I think there is a view in some legal circles that narrowly drafted specific legislation such as this in the criminal law area can create very significant evidentiary problems, even whilst seeking to solve or address those same sorts of problems.

It has also been put to me - we have to take into account issues related to specific legislation about a whole range of new offences as they occur to us - that definitional problems can be created. There is the possibility therefore that a particular matter or a particular crime, offence or activity will fall between the cracks.

I make those points almost gratuitously and in a way to indicate we will not necessarily always support specific legislation that detracts from the general, but in this case we accept the wisdom of the Government's proposed Bill.

MR HUMPHRIES (Treasurer, Attorney-General and Minister for Justice and Community Safety) (4.04), in reply: I thank Mr Stanhope for the Opposition's support of the Crimes Amendment Bill (No. 3) 1999. It is certainly not a usual situation where one is asked to legislate in these very specific terms. But it was not difficult to conceive of weaknesses and shortfalls in our present legislation covering such situations as product contamination, blackmail, extortion and so on - situations such as those which arose in the Arnott's case.

The best example of that is that we have legislation which makes it clearly illegal to threaten or actually to contaminate food products as a basis for extorting money from the manufacturer or somebody else. But I think the situation that arose with the Arnott's case was that a biscuit manufacturer was threatened with these particular fates if the government of a particular State did not subject certain police officers to lie detector tests. So there was no personal gain that was to be obtained by the extortionist in these circumstances and, as such, the present legislation in force in the Australian Capital Territory, had this offence occurred here, would have been problematic and may not have allowed a prosecution to occur when clearly one ought to have occurred, and in fact I think did occur in that particular case.

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