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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 5 Hansard (11 May) . . Page.. 1427 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

The capacity to exclude convictions prescribed by regulation allows for the unexpected consequences of a spent convictions scheme or future alterations to the criminal law or penalties for offences to be accommodated rapidly. Both the New South Wales and the Northern Territory schemes provide for the exclusion of convictions prescribed by regulation of the schemes. The ACT scheme includes a similar provision.

The scheme will apply to all relevant convictions whether they arise before or after the commencement of the scheme. The same approach is employed by every other Australian spent convictions scheme. With the exception of nominal penalties already noted, convictions will become spent only after a period of time, referred to in the bill as the crime free period. Consistent with the majority of Australian jurisdictions, the ACT spent convictions scheme will require a 10-year crime free period for adult convictions to become spent and a five-year crime free period for juvenile convictions to become spent.

If a person is convicted of an offence which was committed in the crime free period but the conviction is not incurred until after the crime free period, the spent conviction may be revived and will not become spent again until the offender has achieved the relevant crime free period in respect of the later offence.

All Australian spent convictions schemes cover convictions in other jurisdictions in addition to convictions in the home jurisdiction. For the ACT scheme, this means that a corresponding offence in another Australian jurisdiction, or a foreign jurisdiction, is dealt with in the same way as an offence in the ACT. Consequently, the corresponding conviction may become spent if all of the requirements of the scheme are met or the existence of a corresponding offence may prevent an ACT offence from becoming spent. An important qualification is that an offence in another jurisdiction that is not an offence in the ACT is not treated as a corresponding offence.

One of the issues which were raised in the comments on the exposure draft bill is that the ACT spent convictions scheme will have jurisdictional limits, insofar as some other Australian and foreign jurisdictions do not recognise convictions as spent. For example, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia do not have spent convictions legislation. So an ACT conviction which may be spent under our legislation, and the legislation of other jurisdictions with such schemes, will not be exempt from disclosure in those states without such schemes.

While a greater degree of consistency in this area of the law across Australian jurisdictions is desirable, the government does not consider that the lack of such consistency is a reason for the ACT not to implement a spent convictions scheme of its own. Like the other Australian spent convictions schemes, the bill will allow a spent conviction to be disregarded by excusing the person convicted from disclosing the conviction and creating offences for improper dealings with information about spent convictions. The bill will not require information held about spent convictions to be destroyed.

A number of specified matters are excluded from the non-disclosure requirements of spent convictions schemes. The ACT legislation ensures that a non-disclosure requirement for spent convictions does not put children, in particular, at risk. There is

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