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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 2 Hansard (1 March) . . Page.. 461 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

I will certainly not be supporting Ms Tucker's motion. Rather than trying to force the Government to do something completely different, it would be far preferable, given that she feels very strongly about this issue, for her to make her submission to this committee on this particular law that she has addressed us on today.

MR HARGREAVES (4.12): I suggest to members that, had Ms Tucker known about Mrs Carnell's letter before it went to the Senate inquiry, she may have done just that.

Ms Tucker: It is a stupid argument they are putting up. You do not even need to answer it.

MR HARGREAVES: It is indeed. The Minister for Education just spoke about how he as a defender and as a prosecutor had come across a number of victims and how perhaps mandatory sentencing might be a good thing. I will give you the victims of two of the cases to which Mr Stanhope referred today both inside and outside the chamber. A shopkeeper was a victim - he lost a packet of biscuits. Another victim was a petrol station owner who lost $1.60 worth of fuel. In both of those cases people were sent to gaol for many months. So do not give me any rot about victims in this particular instance.

Mr Moore: Twenty-eight days is not "many months".

MR HARGREAVES: Twenty-eight days for $1.60 worth of petrol!

Ms Carnell: It is a long time, but it is not "many months". It is important to get it right.

MR HARGREAVES: I stand corrected. They did not get many months for stealing $1.60 worth of petrol; they got a whole month for $1.60 worth of petrol. That is unbelievable. I just do not believe that. I also heard - and I hope I was wrong - Mr Stefaniak talking about how we should be concerned with the ratification of treaties. I certainly hope he was not talking about us not wishing to ratify the international treaty on human rights, because that is, after all, what we are talking about here.

Sometimes the sovereignty of States has to take second place to the sovereignty of human beings. This is one of those cases. We are not talking about burnout legislation, where if a person has committed his or her second offence we automatically take the vehicle off him or her and sell it, although I suspect that is the thin edge of the wedge. What we are talking about is the inevitable result of mandatory sentencing, where somebody loses their life. The horror of that is that they lose their life for something which is absolutely minimal.

I would like to quote a couple of articles which have come my way. The Institute of Criminology tells us that, at 30 June 1998, 780 people aged between 10 and 17 years had been gaoled in juvenile corrective institutions. That is roughly 37 in every 100,000 in that age group. That is a heck of a lot of kids. New South Wales accounts for almost half of that, and the figure in Victoria is decreasing quite significantly - both Labor States, I point out. We need to understand, as Mr Stanhope said, that when mandatory sentencing was brought in in the Northern Territory the incarceration rate went up by 145 per cent.

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