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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Thursday, 4 March 2004) . . Page.. 783 ..

ban of the sale of fireworks all year round will not make the firework industry in the ACT any safer.

Amendment negatived.

Clauses 85 to 87, by leave, taken together and agreed to.

Clause 88.

MS DUNDAS (5.10): Mr Speaker, I seek leave to move amendments Nos 1 and 2 circulated in my name together.

Leave granted.

MS DUNDAS: I move amendments Nos 1 and 2 circulated in my name together [see schedule 3 at page 817].

These two amendments are consequential to the opposition I have to clause 92 of the bill, so I will address not only these amendments but also why I am opposing clause 92 at this stage. Clause 92 goes to the issue of the privilege against self-incrimination. The bill as put forward today removes the privilege of self-incrimination in certain circumstances such as when a person is required to attend questioning in relation to a reasonable belief that contravention of the act has occurred or is occurring. When questioned, a person may not rely on privilege against self-incrimination in refusing to answer a question.

As I noticed in the in-principle stage, the privilege against self-incrimination has been specifically listed in the ACT Legislation Act to protect it in all legislation unless it has been specifically displaced. It was something that we talked about during the discussion on the bill of rights on Tuesday evening. The Northern Territory Law Reform Commission produced a report on the issue of self-incrimination in 2001. The report states:

Courts have traditionally and often emphatically upheld the privilege against self-incrimination. Gibbs CJ in Sorby v The Commonwealth (1983) speaks of the, “firmly established rule of the common law since the 17th century that no person can be compelled to incriminate himself”. He goes on to say …:

“It is a cardinal principle of our system of justice that the Crown must prove the guilt of an accused person, and the protection which that principle affords to the liberty of the individual will be weakened if power exists to compel a suspected person to confess his guilt. Moreover the existence of such a power tends to lead to abuse and “the concomitant moral deterioration in methods of obtaining evidence and in the general administration of justice.”

The removal of the privilege against self-incrimination we believe is unwarranted and further weakens the fundamental common law principles. As High Court Justice Brennan said in EPA v Caltex:

The privilege is designed to protect human dignity. It is designed not to provide a shield against conviction but to provide a shield against conviction run out of the mouth of the offender.

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