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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 3 Hansard (8 March) . . Page.. 664 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

The criminal justice system is rightly embedded in the fabric of social democracy as a great protector of society's values and laws. By its nature, it has to encompass all of society but, by that very nature, sometimes at the fringes it can be a formidable barrier to one of society's most important values, the offer of help to those of us who are in need. That is the issue at the heart of this debate. It is always difficult to establish an arbitrary limit in situations where there are no black-and-white answers. That is the case here.

I note that both the Attorney and Mr Osborne touched on this point. There is quite obviously no correct age of criminal responsibility. I am as aware of that as others. Why not 101/2; why not 91/2; why not 11? There is no way in which we can objectively suggest that there is an age over and above which a child should be deemed to be criminally responsible or should be deemed to know or not to know that what they do offends against the law. That being the case, the issue then becomes a question of judgment. Here today we are exercising our collective judgments on whether eight is an inappropriately young age at which to impute criminal responsibility or whether in our collective judgment, taking all the factors into account, 10 is a better age at which we as a community impute criminal responsibility.

The Labor Party's view is that exercise of that judgment should be based on what is fundamentally a duty of care - society's duty to ensure children are kept out of the criminal justice system wherever possible, for as long as possible. As a mature, responsible society we should offer the nurturing that families and children in trouble need.

Mr Speaker, there is a good deal of evidence to support our contention that the age should be raised. The Attorney and Mr Osborne, in their contributions to the debate, expressed concern about the sort of evidence that one might take into account, but I think there is some evidence. In a recent paper, "Criminal Careers and Crime Prevention", Dr Adam Graybar, the director of the Institute of Criminology, reported some interesting research. He found that a small number of persons in a birth cohort are responsible for the majority of the crimes committed by that birth cohort. A small minority of offenders commit the significant majority of offences. However, a small proportion of chronic offenders, about 5 per cent of males, account for about half of all offences. An early age of onset of offending foreshadows a long criminal career and many offences. These are research findings that surprise none of us. I do not think it surprises any of us to discover that 5 per cent of males in any particular birth cohort commit about half of all offences committed by that group.

We have to keep in mind that most children do not offend and that those who do offend were not born criminals. Children who do become criminals were not born criminals. Their criminality was born of other factors, other pressures and other circumstances. It was not the fact of their birth that rendered them criminals.

A report completed for the Commonwealth Attorney-General's Department - "Pathways to Prevention" - found a range of common factors associated with young offenders. These factors are childhood factors of difficult temperament and poor social skills; family factors of poor parental supervision and discipline, substance abuse, family violence and disharmony, long-term parental unemployment, and abuse and neglect; school factors of

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