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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 3 Hansard (6 March) . . Page.. 614 ..

MS DUNDAS (continuing):

However, rather than trying to instil fear into the community by beating up the crime rates under one government or the other, let's look at the real causes of crime and real strategies for crime prevention. The latter include community confidence in the neighbourhood, in the police service, in the judiciary, and confidence that the Assembly members are working on real solutions.

We should be looking for the cause, and we should be looking at why people are committing crimes, and concentrating on rehabilitation. Punishment, revenge and an eye-for-an-eye attitude achieve little but a high prison population.

Harsher penalties may excite the media. They also seem to excite "old party" politicians. They may also excite those who want revenge, but they do absolutely nothing to assist in the rehabilitation process.

We know that sentencing guidelines have a long and chequered history, and when, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal set sentencing guidelines, it was clearly intended that people convicted of culpable driving should go to jail. At the time, the move was applauded. However, the result was not the desired outcome, as more offenders than before pleaded not guilty, and juries, particularly in country areas, were not prepared to convict people of the offence as they knew it now carried a jail term. As a result, fewer convictions were made and more offenders continued to drive their cars.

One thing that needs to be made clear is that introducing sentencing guidelines to provide for consistency can be distinguished from introducing them as a result of allegations of systemic excessive leniency. Where there is inconsistency, sentencing guidelines may be helpful in creating structure for sentencing, whereas allegations of systemic leniency, which often do appear in the media, are not well informed, but rather based on a couple of high profile cases. The media do not look systematically at the day in, day out imposition of sentences that are generally regarded as correct and passed without comment.

Sentencing is a popular issue. It is popular with talkback radio and regularly ranks in the top three talkback issues in Australian capital cities. Not surprisingly, though I do not suggest causation, there is no mainstream political imperative to cut the rates of imprisonment.

This cuts to the heart of the question about who should decide sentences: should it be those on talkback radio, the parliament or the judiciary? If it were the parliament, we must consider that for the Attorney-General, the first law officer of the territory and a member of the executive, to put forward sentencing guidelines surely blurs the distinction between the executive and the judiciary.

Let's look at what happened in the Northern Territory, where sentencing guidelines saw many examples of injustice occurring in the courts, as judges' hands were tied in regard to the mandatory sentencing of juveniles. This just makes the courts pawns in political games, where there are no winners.

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