Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 2 Hansard (4 March) . . Page.. 427 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

reasonable principle and one the Greens support. However, as is usually true, getting from the principle to an outcome is where problems arise.

Proceeds of crime laws have been controversial from the beginning, as the scrutiny of bills report pointed out. The government response dismisses some of the discussion as old and out of date. There are, however, arguments which are still relevant, even though, as the government points out, there have been other laws passed in the meantime. The scrutiny of bills report also referred to recognition in the United Kingdom that civil forfeiture regimes ought to comply with human rights safeguards. This is not old and out of date-it was in 2002.

Some of the changes are described as being the means to make tackling organised crime easier, or even possible. That is a fine aim, and is one that could, of course, be achieved in part by taking drug use out of the criminal system and putting it into the health and society care systems instead. However, the aim is fundamentally acceptable. The bill does not limit what are quite extreme powers with regard to larger-scale, corporate or organised crime. In fact, this bill takes a big step towards drawing in other forms of crime.

In this bill, and under the current act, there is a different treatment for serious crimes compared to ordinary indictable offences. People accused of committing serious crimes are likely to lose more of their possessions. Conviction of a serious crime results in an automatic forfeiture of all the property defined as tainted, rather than leaving it up to the relevant court to decide, for that particular case, whether a conviction forfeiture order should be made.

In this new bill, only serious crimes may be dealt with by the new non-conviction based, civil forfeiture based order or a civil penalty order. However, the Proceeds of Crime Act defines serious crimes as serious narcotics offences, organised fraud and money laundering in relation to proceeds of either of the above. This bill will define serious crimes as any crimes with a possible maximum penalty of five years or more in jail.

When the last Assembly created the same definition of "serious offence"in the Bail Act, I pointed out that this would include someone found to have stolen a new mountain bike, or a burglary involving goods with a value over $1,000. This is a major change and one which received scant attention in the introductory speeches and by its champion, Mr Stefaniak.

The explanatory memorandum alludes to organised crime. The speech in the government response to the scrutiny of bills report refers to the increase in organised and major white-collar crime, so there is no attention drawn to the other side of the bill. It is the same motivation-lowering the threshold of the most important powers the police and other law enforcement agents have to use against the most serious crimes.

The test for whether it is a reasonable step to take, to allow those powers to come in at an earlier point, should be weighing the effects of catching people, or stopping more crimes, versus the effects on an innocent person who is accused and against whom these tools are used. That is why, when we saw that the five-year term definition of serious crime could be used for someone stealing a bicycle, we argued that the balance was wrong. The harm

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .