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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 9 Hansard (6 September) . . Page.. 2933 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

We should bear in mind that the people who are really hurting out of these new arrangements are the lawyers who are missing out on the fat fees that used to go with collecting these payments in the courts. Notwithstanding the fact that I am a lawyer, I do not believe that that kind of industry based on criminal injuries compensation was really in the best interests of the community. What is in the best interests of the community is a scheme whereby if you are injured or hurt or psychologically damaged by a criminal act you have a comprehensive assistance scheme available to you to use straightaway. It is not a matter of going to courts and getting lump sum payments and so on to go off and spend on your counselling and so on perhaps months or years after you sustained the injury. You need a service right then and there, and that is what we have today with the victims assistance service. That is that way it should be. There is simply no justification to go back to the previous arrangements.

MR STANHOPE (Leader of the Opposition) (3.40): The Labor Party will be supporting Ms Tucker's bill. The amendments proposed by Ms Tucker are consistent with the position that both the Labor Party and the Greens have previously advocated, particularly in relation to this debate.

The provisions in the draft bill essentially do a number of things. They delete the special provisions for police and emergency service workers, increasing the maximum benefit for all victims to $50,000 for pain and suffering. They amend the definition of extremely serious injury to only serious injury and remove any reference to the permanence or otherwise of the injury. They require all victims to exhaust their workers' compensation rights before applying under the act. They provide an entitlement for assistance to victims engaged in unpaid domestic work or child care. They permit victims to seek assistance from victim support schemes other than the government scheme. They downgrade the discrimination against a victim who is intoxicated by removing the requirement on the court to reduce the amount payable if the victim was intoxicated at the time of the crime. They remove the retrospective operation of the amendments introduced by the government in December 1999.

I must say that I was interested to see the response of the scrutiny of bills committee to this bill, particularly the committee's decision that there were no major rights issues with the bill. I would have thought there clearly are some rights issues, particularly in relation to retrospectivity and the hierarchy of victims that were created as a result of the passage of the bill in December 1999.

The two aspects of the bill, as passed in December last year, that I think have created the most discussion, debate or dissension at least within the community are those that go to the decision to make the legislation retrospective and so deny to significant numbers of Canberra citizens, some hundreds of Canberra citizens, the right to pursue claims that they had or believed they had, or at least were entitled to pursue at the time the legislation was passed.

I think it is to be seriously regretted that we did, at that time, disenfranchise people who had been injured as a result of a crime. Some hundreds of people who had been subjected to criminal activity were denied the opportunity to pursue a lawful action for compensation under the law as it existed under the legislation that was then in place. They were denied the opportunity to pursue a lawful claim which they had at that time.

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