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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 10 Hansard (18 October) . . Page.. 3199 ..

MR HUMPHRIES: No, that is in respect of the Royal Canberra Hospital implosion only. You are not limiting this to the Royal Canberra Hospital implosion, not as far as I am aware. This covers any prosecution that may be brought under the Occupational Health and Safety Act 1989 or under the Dangerous Goods Act 1975, if I am not mistaken, Mr Berry. You can correct me if I am wrong about that-any prosecution. For any person who has been mentioned in a coronial finding in the last three years, where the finding is more than a year ago, that person's liability has now been revived in respect of that offence.

They have not been prosecuted in the space of 12 months after the coronial finding, but they now can be, even though that person-if there were such a person in existence-has breathed a sigh of relief and said, "Well, I'm off the hook; I'm a free person now."

Mr Berry: Why should they get off the hook?

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Berry poses the question: why should they get off the hook? The answer is that, irrespective of what moral culpability a person might have in these circumstances, the law of the land, the law of the territory as of today, says that this person, this notional person, is free of any liability for prosecution. They are regarded in every sense as innocent people. And Mr Berry's legislation has the effect of making them potentially guilty people again.

Now, if you do a certain act, the law can apply to you to make that act illegal, and the law of course can change from time to time; the law does change. I will give you an example. A hundred years ago, if I had sold Mr Smyth a packet of opium I would have committed no offence because it was not against the law to sell opium in those days. If I sold Mr Smyth a packet of opium today, the same act would certainly attract strong criminal penalties.

So it is a question of how the law impacts on certain acts. What is fundamentally important, I would argue, is that you do not take acts that have already been committed and change their status at the law after the person has done them. That is, I would suggest, a very wrong thing to do. But that is precisely what Mr Berry's bill does. A person who did something three years ago, in respect of which there have been coroner's findings since that time and for whom a year has elapsed since those coroner's findings, has no liability at the law in respect of those matters-until today. But after today they will have a liability, because of the legislation Mr Berry is proposing today. I would hope members would consider that fairly seriously.

MS TUCKER (12.58): The Greens will be supporting these bills, for the same reasons we supported them when they came up last year. We are not of the view that the former statute of limitations should come into effect simply because the legal system in the ACT is overburdened or otherwise too slow, or because a coroner's inquest, in dealing with legal representation from countless separate entities in the scrambled chain of command, takes two years.

The point of the OH&S and dangerous goods acts is that those people who are negligent in the performance of their duties are held accountable. Given the seriousness of the consequences of the decision to conduct a public implosion of the hospital, and given the

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