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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 12 Hansard (5 December) . . Page.. 3630 ..

MR HUMPHRIES: I thank Mr Osborne for that question. I have sought some advice from the justice department about this matter to see whether any issues that Mr Hull gave rise to in his article deserve further consideration. I understand that incarceration statistics do not support Mr Hull's generalisation that the courts are taking a lenient approach to violent crime - at least, that is the advice I have received. In 1999 - 2000 over 50 per cent of ACT prisoners were sentenced to imprisonment because they had been convicted of crimes involving violence, such as armed robbery, assault and burglary. By comparison, the number of people convicted of violent crimes is less than 30 per cent of the offenders convicted.

Whether that disproves what Mr Hull had to say is another matter and further work is being done by the justice department on that question to ascertain whether there is a basis for that concern. I do not need to tell members of this place that sentencing policy is a matter that is reserved under ACT law to judges and magistrates. It is a matter over which members of the Assembly and governments have very little control, much as we might wish that to be otherwise on occasions.

Mr Speaker, I will say this about Mr Hull's article: first of all, I have no doubt that there have been occasions when, as an outsider, one would have to question the appropriateness of sentences passed down by courts. I have struggled to understand the basis for those decisions on occasions. I respect the fact that judges and magistrates sit in courts, hear all the evidence and make decisions based on what they hear and that nobody else who was not present has anything like the same capacity to understand what is going on and what has been provided in the way of evidence; so sometimes the view that we obtain from the media of a particular matter might be quite distorted and inappropriate.

I also believe that there is no doubt whatever that the approach the courts take to crime, the way in which they sentence for certain categories of crime, produces a perception in the community about the extent to which that crime can be gotten away with. Whether the facts support Mr Hull's contention, and I am going to have some advice about that in due course, the fact is that I think that there is a perception in parts of the community that sentencing for armed robbery, for example, is fairly light and that a prison term for a first offence is very unlikely. I strongly suspect that that provides a form of encouragement to some people in certain circumstances.

Mr Speaker, I believe that there does need to be a broader community debate about sentencing issues. I do not think that it can be a matter that is left entirely to judges and magistrates in the sense of a broad debate about policy. Obviously, I do not believe that anyone other than the magistrates or judges concerned should make decisions in particular cases, but the broader debate does need to be had here and elsewhere in the community and Mr Hull's article on the weekend would be a good stimulus for that. I think that we would need to avoid hyperbole and exaggeration. We especially need to avoid a fear and loathing type of scenario, but we do need to have a debate nonetheless. I hope that that can be accelerated and promoted by discussions of that kind.

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