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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 2 Hansard (4 March) . . Page.. 445 ..
MR STANHOPE (continuing):
The court is bound by subclause (4), which states:
(4) In deciding whether it would not be in the public interest to allow artistic profits as benefits, the court must have regard to the following matters:
(a) the purposes of this Act;
(b) whether the commercial exploitation has any general social or educational value;
(c) the nature and purposes of the commercial exploitation, including its use for research, educational or rehabilitation purposes;
(d) the seriousness of the offence;
(e) how long ago the offence was committed.
Subclause (5) states:
(5) Subsection (4) does not limit the matters to which the court may have regard.
I accept the difficulty of some of the issues and concepts we are dealing with here today. There are circumstances in which some criminals exploit their criminal activity in a quite shocking and outrageous way, and this provision simply circumvents or makes more difficult their capacity to do that.
But if we are talking here about education, rehabilitation and people trying to build a new life for themselves, then of course we are not going to punish them for that. We are not going to be vindictive about it. This is not an extra form of punishment. Certainly it is a deterrence, certainly I think it is legitimate, but it is not appropriate to suggest this is just vengeance, that this is revenge, that this is cracking down on an undesirable class of people for the purposes of vengeance or for the purposes of adding a second level of punishment. It is not.
MR STEFANIAK ( 12.24): Mr Speaker, the opposition also will not be supporting Ms Tucker's amendment. Indeed, we would agree with virtually everything the Chief Minister has said, which is a bit rare in this place.
Mr Stanhope: A bit worrying.
MR STEFANIAK: A bit worrying-I said "nearly everything". In this instance, I think the Minister made some very good points. Let me say that the Australian Law Reform Commission is hardly a body of rednecks. It is a body comprised of some very eminent jurors; people experienced in all aspects of the law; people who are experienced not only perhaps in the prosecution side but also in the defence side; people who have spent a lot of time on bodies such as the Law Society and the Bar Association. I think we need to give due credence to what they say on this issue.
My second point relates to a matter raised by Ms Tucker. Let me give an example, which I think is a good one, of how this legislation would operate, and I think most ordinary
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