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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 7 Hansard (21 June) . . Page.. 2397 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

I was delighted with the provision of an extra 10 police for Gungahlin. I must confess to Mr Hargreaves that I am not quite sure whether they will be coming out of Belconnen. I thought they were new. No doubt my colleague the police minister will look into the comments that you made. Indeed, I thank you for your comments. You have made some helpful suggestions and some helpful comments tonight. Your party often has not been robust in supporting the provision of reasonable powers and so on to the police, but I think that your heart is in the right place in terms of trying to assist our police force.

Mr Stanhope made a number of comments as well. He referred to compensation for victims and mentioned the case recently in the Supreme Court which resulted in a 2:1 verdict against the ACT on criminal injuries compensation. An eminent Queen's Counsel, Mr Richard Tracey, has indicated that in his opinion, with the greatest respect to the learned judges who formed the majority, that he thought that they had erred. He feels that the minority judge had the right end of the stick there. I read the judgment and Mr Stanhope is right: a lot of it revolved around property rights.

Far be it from me to criticise a judgment of the court, but there was a split decision there. The majority went against us. I can see where Mr Tracey is coming from. He is a very experienced counsel. Accordingly, the government has appealed. I was interested to see that the committee asked us where we are you going to get the money from, but then it said not to appeal, just pay out the money. By the way, it will be about $4 million. There is a bit of an inconsistency there, Mr Speaker. The government has taken the advice of Richard Tracey QC and appealed. Obviously, if ultimately the government loses, the money will be paid out.

There was an excellent recommendation by the committee in relation to tracking the performance of courts on a couple of things. We are updating the computer system by making it more user friendly to assist the administration of justice in many ways. There was a very good committee suggestion, which the government has said it will be taking into consideration in upgrading the system, in terms of looking at how various magistrates and judges spend their time and sentencing patterns. I will deal with sentencing patterns first.

Mr Stanhope spoke about there being all sorts of options to imprisonment and seemed to think-I do not want to misquote him-that it might show up where we were using imprisonment too much. With the greatest of respect to Mr Stanhope, I think the Canberra community feels that not enough people are being sent to gaol in this community. We have the lowest incarceration rate in the country. A lot of that may well have something to do with the fact that we do not have our own prison. We will see what happens there. But it is certainly something which is of great consideration to a lot of people I speak to in the community.

I do not think people mind too much the minor crimes, which is fair enough, but for armed robbery, nasty crimes of violence, repeat burglaries, repeat car thefts and things like that, there is a lot to be said for having consistency Australia wide, and there are some real and, I think, some very valid concerns in the community that our courts are not robust enough in terms of sentencing compared with their interstate colleagues. Hopefully, that will change with having a prison. Indeed, that will also ensure that we will have control over our prisoners and some of the legitimate concerns expressed by our judges and magistrates can be taken into account.

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