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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 14 Hansard (10 December) . . Page.. 4145 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

Another general comment relevant to the property offences is the substantial increase in penalties. The damage to waterways and railways provisions in sections 141 to 148 of the current Crimes Act carry a penalty of seven or 10 years. These are our sabotage offences-the specific type referred to by the Model Criminal Code Officers Committee. This include the offence of damaging or destroying signals for trains, which really is likely to cause serious injury or death, although the section does not mention that specifically. These offences, too, are not for threatened actions but for actual actions.

So why are we significantly bumping up the penalty-from 10 years to actually interfere with a railway signal, up to 15 years to threaten to cause damage to a public facility, and up to 25 years to actually cause damage to a public facility? (Extension of time granted.)

As I have said, the model criminal code report explains the heavy penalty by the clause's heritage as an offence specifically for terrorist acts. In light of our recent personal understanding in the West of what that can mean, I can understand to some extent the desire to make the penalties greater. On the other hand, destroying a dam would wreak massive destruction, too. I record the Greens' strong opposition to this kind of increase in penalties.

MR STANHOPE (Chief Minister, Attorney-General, Minister for Health, Minister for Community Affairs and Minister for Women) (5.53): Mr Speaker, the government will support revised amendment No 1. The government had intended to oppose Ms Tucker's initially circulated amendment in relation to this provision but I am glad that, through the consultation that has occurred between Ms Tucker's office, Ms Dundas' office and my office, there is a formulation that we have all agreed on.

Having said that, I have to say I didn't find Ms Tucker's speech in support of her amendment particularly persuasive, and I feel it is important to respond to that. It is important that we understand what it is that the government is doing here. Ms Tucker has given some very significant thought, effort and energy to setting out her concerns around this sabotage clause within the criminal code, and I would like to respond in some detail to that.

I have to say at the outset that it is very difficult to see how the sabotage offences in the bill could ever be used to prosecute peaceful protestors or those involved in lawful industrial action, and it most certainly is not the intention of the legislation that that be the case.

Ms Tucker's amendment reads:

To remove any doubt, a person does not commit an offence against this section only because the person takes part in a protest, strike or lockout.

It was never the intention, of course, that a provision that is aimed wholly and solely at sabotage, a concept which most of us have a reasonable understanding about, would be used against a person participating in a protest, strike or lockout. Ms Tucker's amendment seeks to remove any doubt that that is the case, that "a person does not commit an offence against the section only because". In that sense, the government is happy to accede to that question of making it crystal clear that only because of

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