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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 5 Hansard (3 May) . . Page.. 1499 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

This is in addition to the existing penalties for assault, which would be applied if a driver physically attacks another driver. I am not sure why the government has introduced this bill, apart from wanting to keep the law and order lobby on side. The menacing driving offence was only introduced in March 2000, and there have only been three convictions so far for menacing driving.

While we have all heard stories about road rage, there does not appear to be any evidence that police do not have the power to deal with such incidents. This bill raises some worrying issues about the direction the government is heading in with the penalisation of traffic offences. The bill basically applies the existing provisions for car seizure and burnout offences to the offence of menacing driving.

I accept that there is some logic to taking away the car of someone who is doing burnouts: the car is an integral part of doing a burnout, and the sorts of people who indulge in burnouts identify strongly with their vehicles. However, in the case of road rage, it is totally the person in the car who is doing the raging. It has nothing to do with the particular car they are driving.

The government seems to be treating the car as an offensive weapon, or perhaps it just wants to increase the penalties for traffic offences by also taking away the offender's car. Until recently, the general approach to traffic offences was to penalise the offender who drives irresponsibly by taking away their licence to drive. It then does not matter how many cars they own or have access to, because they cannot legally drive them. We are now starting to penalise traffic offenders by taking away their cars as well.

How far is the government intending to take this? Will they start taking away the cars of drink-driving offenders or speeding offenders? There does not seem to be any consideration given to the possibility that the car may also be driven by other people in the offender's family. They may be perfectly law abiding, but they are also being penalised by the lack of a car to drive.

We have also not seen any evidence from the government of whether the incidence of road rage is actually increasing and why this might be the case. If it is increasing, perhaps it is because there are more cars on the road and thus more possibilities of clashes between car drivers. Perhaps it is the nature of the ACT's road system, the level of traffic congestion or particular road rules that is causing frustration in motorists. Rather than just increase penalties for road rage, perhaps the government should make a greater effort to prevent it in the first place through its transport policies.

I am also concerned that the bill allows cars to be seized from people before they have even been charged with an offence and, certainly, before they have been convicted. This, once again, reverses the important civil liberties principle that people are presumed innocent until proven guilty. I acknowledge that this bill is an improvement on the burnout provisions, in that the police have to see the person acting in a menacing way before they seize the car. In the burnout provision they need only have reasonable grounds for believing that an offence has been committed.

However, what constitutes menacing driving is left to the discretion of individual police officers, as is whether to impose the penalty of seizing the person's vehicle, when it should really be the court that decides on whether the person is acting in a menacing

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