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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 3 Hansard (6 March) . . Page.. 610 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

simply do not have the capacity to know that, because they have not been tried. There are similar problems in trying to gauge the overall effect of 9A.

As I said before, we supported the original section 9A, but we did not support the further amendments that the government later ran through with their then confreres on the crossbench.

I guess the bottom line is that any decisions we make, particularly in relation to criminal justice and the locking up of people, do have to be informed by a real understanding of exactly what we are doing, the implications of it, and what the data are on which we base those sorts of decisions. We do need to have a look at the operation of the Bail Act, and that is something that will be done as a matter of course by the Department of Justice and Community Safety. That is something that we will do a little bit further down the track.

The shadow Attorney also referred to the fact that the government has announced that it will have a look at police powers. This is something we announced in the election campaign: it is something that we will do. We will have a look at police powers to ensure that police do have adequate powers to protect the community, without unduly interfering with citizens engaged in lawful activity.

During the last term, the government ran through a whole raft of amendments to the criminal law. A lot of them were knee jerk, ad hoc, uninformed, and very much driven by ideology rather than any determination to do anything serious about understanding the nature of crime and the way that we need to deal with it.

This government has no intention of engaging in some wide-scale roll-back of police powers. However, there were certain aspects of some of the amendments that the previous government introduced and pushed through that do need to be examined seriously, for instance, the right of police to enter a home on the basis that they believe that a summary offence, in some instances, may have been committed.

That is what we got down to under this last government, that police have a right to enter your home if they believe, in some instances, that a summary offence has been committed. I think we do need to look seriously at whether or not the police need powers like that and, really, it is irrelevant to me that the opposition are running this outrageous scare campaign about our intentions to roll back police powers. We are talking here about whether or not it is appropriate for the police to be able to enter your home, or my home, on the basis that a policeman may believe that somebody in the house may have committed a summary offence. That is not within the range of powers that the police have anywhere else in Australia.

This is a unique power that you gave the police in this place. It is not a power they need. There is no demonstrated need for it. I bet it has not even been used once since you introduced it. It is an unnecessary power and it should be looked at. I bet there is not a single instance of a policeman with such a belief entering a house without a warrant in relation to a summary offence. It is a power that you gave them, a power that they do not need, and a power that the police do not have anywhere else in Australia. We should look at those sorts of things, because you did some crazy things when you were in government.

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