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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 11 Hansard (22 October) . . Page.. 3966 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

Victims of crime do feel at times victimised again by the courts. Only a small proportion of the victims of crime feel that the courts have dealt with them well. I understand from the government's response to the commission's report that the government will be introducing a similar change but in a broader bill, so we will consider this matter again in that context.

In the last debate in the place on bail laws, which was in the last Assembly, I raised a number of questions about the basis for what was proposed by the then Liberal government, which was being supported by Labor in opposition. I asked whether we knew why reoffending was happening. Another way of asking the same question is: why are we making incorrect decisions on particular cases?

Over the past decade and a half, the Australian Institute of Criminology have sponsored a number of conferences and other studies asking this question and related questions on bail decisions. In 1988, the then police chief for the ACT complained that, in the absence of a bail ordinance which was due to come in the following year, decisions on bail were generally in favour of bail. He presented four case studies of offenders, burglars and car thieves who had reoffended while on bail and were repeatedly granted bail. He believed that this was because, in the absence of an ordinance, the ACT courts were operating under the common law presumption for bail.

Similar opinions of the system have been expressed by police in recent years but, in the absence of the kind of detailed analysis of what happens to particular people in terms of the people who are granted bail and those who are not, information in reviewing that is important for the making of the decision in the first place.

In a study of the South Australian system, which at that time had a high proportion of people on remand and the lowest proportion of people in prison compared with the rest of the country, one of the papers compared the laws in different jurisdictions and concluded that the quality of the information given to the courts as decision makers determines the success of outcomes. Good decisions on bail would be understood as people on bail not reoffending, turning up for their court date and not too many people who were remanded in custody later being found innocent.

The last problem is the one that much of the balance in our justice system seeks to deal with. It is better to have a guilty person go free than an innocent person being unjustly imprisoned. The author referred to an experiment in New York in the early 1960s in which there was an emphasis on ensuring courts were provided with comprehensive and verified information on defendants who would be good bail risks. The author lamented the paucity of studies in New Zealand and Australia.

A paper on crime prevention devoted to an objective system for bail suggested an actuarial approach to risk. That, I believe, would only work in terms of justice in the community in combination with well-researched support programs for people on bail.

As the Chief Minister said, this is not a simple issue and we are not prepared to support this approach, but we will look at the government's approach.

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