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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Thursday, 12 February 2004) . . Page.. 330 ..

laws that begin to infringe on general legal principles, such as the provisions contained in this piece of legislation.

I will briefly outline my major concerns. I have an amendment to section 92 of the act, which goes to the protection of the privilege against self-incrimination. Many courts have spoken of the fundamental common law right to privilege against self-incrimination. Our own Legislation Act specifically preserves this right in all ACT legislation; however, the Dangerous Substances Bill specifically displaces this right. I believe that we, as an Assembly, need to consider carefully whether the reduction of rights is necessary for this legislation to be workable.

Similarly, I have amendments that go to the level of strict liability offences. The issue of strict liability is one that I have discussed before. I have concerns that the level of strict liability is unnecessarily high for the adequate enforcement of these laws. I have a further amendment which questions the dissociation between a defendant and the possession of a mental element in the conduct of a criminal offence.

I think the issue that section was designed to address is adequately dealt with in section 193 of the bill. It is a long-established principle of law that the prosecution must prove criminal culpability in order for a person to be convicted of a crime. We have enshrined this principle into the criminal code and I do not believe it needs to be in any way violated. I believe that this is a serious erosion of the standard of evidence required for a conviction. I believe it is unnecessary for the functioning of the act and so should not be included in the Dangerous Substances Bill.

I also have an amendment which addresses the protection of the chief executive from defamation. I believe the reference to the Civil Law (Wrongs) Act is unnecessary. I note that the minister has an amendment on the issue, resulting from my inquiries, and I thank her for taking up the suggestion. However, I believe we can go further and remove any rule which states that whatever a chief executive considers appropriate is automatically a fair report, even if it is not. This provision is unnecessary and I hope the Assembly will see the merit of my argument.

I note again that a lot of work has been done on this bill in an extremely short amount of time. I can see that a huge number of considerations and information from diverse sources have gone into the debating process. However, I believe the Assembly needs to address whether the erosion of legal principles is the necessary and appropriate way for the objects of this legislation to be enforced.

It is my belief that we need to examine the consequences of including these provisions in the Dangerous Substances Bill. Ours is a small jurisdiction and the content of one piece of legislation will often come back before the Assembly as a provision in another bill. I do not believe the provisions I have identified are needed for this bill—I do not believe they are needed for any bill—and I do not want them considered normal or standard clauses in a piece of legislation. If the Dangerous Substances Bill is passed with those clauses remaining as they are written, we will be setting a dangerous precedent in relation to human and legal rights in the ACT.

We do not show how strong our legislation is by the number of rights we trample on. We can have a tough, robust, enforceable and stringent law without infringing the rights of

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