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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 7 Hansard (21 June) . . Page.. 2388 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

relation to retrospectivity. It is a pity that the government chose to disadvantage so many Canberrans retrospectively in the way that it did, people who had been the victims of crime, who had instituted appropriate action and who had a right at the time to pursue a victims of crime compensation claim. It is a pity that the government passed a law in the first place and that they had to contested. The government has wasted more money in relation to the defence of that matter in the courts. I cannot understand how the government at any stage thought that the matter would not be appealed against and that the Supreme Court would not find as it has.

In relation to that, it is moot at this time to reflect on some of the other changes which the government and its coalition partners made to the victims of crime legislation, namely, the quite bizarre and discriminatory decision to include police and emergency service officers in the class of people in the ACT who would suffer pain and injury as a result of being subjected to criminal action. It is interesting that, since the change, 25 members of the police force have received criminal injuries compensation for pain and suffering.

One wonders at the extent to which the pain and suffering of those people is in any way different from the pain and suffering endured by, say, an 18-year-old checkout person at a service station who has had a blood-filled syringe held at their neck, or the pain and suffering that a young woman shop attendant or bank clerk may have suffered as a result of being held up with a gun or in some other violent way. One wonders why it is that the government chose to divide the community in this way, chose to treat some members of the community as more worthy of compensation than others, or why it chose to assume that some members of the community were in such a special class that their propensity to suffer pain was much greater than that of other people subjected to outrageous criminal behaviour.

We understood and, to a significant extent, accepted the need for some reform of the criminal injuries process, but it continues to belie belief that the government sought to divide the community in this way, to set up a series of classes of people who were more worthy of compensation than others. We have seen the fruits of that with members of the police force willingly trotting along and being compensated at the expense of the entire community and in circumstances where I have no doubt that there have been other victims of crime who have suffered horrendously at the hands of criminals and who have not had the same capacity for support from the community.

An interesting issue that needs to be concentrated on is the cost of court transcripts. It is something that we need to continue to debate that so many people in the community do not have access to transcripts. It was interesting to see the discussion in the media this week about the capacity which the new IT support system that the court has for tracking the performance of the courts and for assisting the managers of the courts to manage those courts in terms of the way in which different magistrates of different courts are operating and the outputs of the different courts and different magistrates. It will provide tremendous aid in assessing sentencing patterns and will in the future lead to a better understanding of issues around sentencing.

There are some very interesting issues around sentencing facing the community, including the extent to which we are imprisoning more people. I would like to see a real analysis of why it is that more and more people are being imprisoned and why we seem

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