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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 3 Hansard (8 March) . . Page.. 668 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

The other comments I wanted to make briefly were on the issue of what leads people to commit crimes. Both Mr Hargreaves and Mr Stanhope raised this issue. It is an interesting issue. I for one believe that the causes of criminal activity and criminal intent are extremely complicated. They relate to a number of factors. The ones mentioned, I am sure, all contribute to that state of affairs.

Mr Hargreaves argued that if children are victims of, say, exposure to the things on television that lead them to adopt certain behaviour earlier on or if their upbringing is deficient in some way that leads them towards criminal behaviour then those things ought to be taken into account and we ought to raise the age. You could apply the arguments Mr Hargreaves has put not just to people between the ages of eight and 10 but to older young people as well and indeed even to adults. In many adults criminal behaviour relates directly to the way in which they have been brought up - from the lack of love they have been shown in their homes to the way in which their parents have set bad examples through the use of violence in homes. Equally, we could argue against prosecution of many adults in the same circumstances. But the fact is we have to have a response to this problem. If people do things which harm other people or which damage or harm property, we have taken the view that we should have some punitive steps to take against them, and it is almost entirely within the criminal justice system that that occurs.

I remind members that not long ago the ACT Government put forward legislation that would allow people who were suffering from a mental dysfunction to be dealt with outside the criminal justice system, in a system that allowed them to be confined for the duration of an episode but which was clearly not putting them within the confines of the criminal justice system. In this debate, where we are talking about the inadequacies of the criminal justice system, it would seem to me that finding alternative ways of dealing with particularly severe problems was quite an appropriate one. I remind members that it was the strong view of the Assembly that that kind of option should not be available. We have to remember that we have taken the view in this place that the criminal justice system almost has to be the way in which we deal with manifestations of problems once it becomes necessary to respond to them in this place. Perhaps we should come back and re-examine our response to that issue in the future.

Finally, I want to react to the comment by Mr Stanhope that no child is born a criminal. He mentioned a number of factors which lead to criminal behaviour. He talked about upbringing, an environment of crime, example and so on. But he has raised that very difficult longstanding debate about the balance between environment and heredity, the balance between people's genetic disposition to certain things and the environment in which they are placed.

I certainly believe that there is undoubtedly a question of genetic disposition which arises in this matter. That arises particularly when we look at mental illness as a factor contributing to crime. A large number of people in our gaols at the moment are clearly suffering from a degree of mental illness. Unquestionably that is the case. Is mental illness entirely a product of environment? Frankly, I doubt it. I think that at least some mental illness, and probably a large proportion of mental illness, is attributable to a genetic issue rather than to environment.

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