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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 1 Hansard (20 February) . . Page.. 305 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

This bill also takes the sensible step of ensuring that criminals cannot access proceeds of crime for their own legal defence; that basically the proceeds of crime cannot be spent on hiring very smart QCs and teams of lawyers to represent them and to perhaps delay proceedings. Under this bill, criminals will have to use their own assets and not the proceeds of crime. Assuming that they do not have sufficient assets, it could be that there is some provision to use criminal assets up to the legal aid rates. That might be a bit of a problem, but given that this legislation follows that of the Commonwealth, we are certainly prepared to see how that operates. However, I raise that as perhaps something that can be further improved. At any rate, this certainly is a lot better than the previous legislation.

Clause 3 of the bill sets out the purposes of the bill, which are basically: to encourage law-abiding behaviour; to give effect to the very important principle that people should not be enriched by crime; to deprive people of all material advantage gained from crime; to deprive criminals of property that is used to commit crime; to enable the effective tracing and seizure of criminal assets, and I have alluded to a few things that now make that a bit easier; and to enable the territory to enforce interstate confiscation measures which, again, is very important, given that crime knows no boundaries.

The Law Reform Commission, as I said, made a number of very good recommendations which have been taken up in this piece of legislation. These include simplifying the process of obtaining things like restraining orders, recasting judicial discretions in relation to the granting of orders, clarifying the public trustee's powers to administer restrained and forfeited assets, strengthening the information gathering powers of the law enforcement authorities, providing for transaction suspension orders and allowing confiscation applications to be dealt with by an inferior court.

This bill will not only apply to the sort of crime that people in the community would generally think of-that is, the proceeds of crime from drug dealers. It is also capable of being used in respect of a whole gamut of damage suffered by the community. There is the potential for the bill to apply to the proceeds of crime in a number of areas, including corporate crime and taxation. It could even be used in cases where corporations cause severe damage to the environment and even to public health, often deliberately and simply to generate a profit. There is the potential for the legislation to be used against white collar criminals who might use the Internet to defraud scores of people; or, indeed, it could even be used against people who might make a profit through sexually exploiting children for profit. So it has a large number of potential uses, all of which will help us achieve a very good social goal.

I should perhaps deal with one other aspect before I refer to the comments of the Scrutiny of Bills Committee and the Attorney's response, which I basically accept. In the past-basically in the 1980s-there has been a bit of confusion about civil confiscation measures. People would argue that they have a punitive effect, which is actually, in my opinion, quite nonsensical. They suggest that these measures, therefore, should only be available when a person has been convicted of an offence.

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