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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Thursday, 1 July 2004) . . Page.. 3128 ..

quite prepared to accept the need to report matters to the police. The police are usually very user friendly, especially with issues such as sexual assault and the more difficult issues.

It is difficult to categorise certain offences and say that some are more worrying than others, that some deserve to be treated differently. The committee heard some strong evidence and received some strong submissions as to why sexual assault should be treated differently. VOCAL stated that it is difficult to categorise offences and say that some are more serious than others. It depends on the matter and on the individual victim. Quite clearly, a nasty armed robbery might have a horribly traumatic effect on a bank teller. It is a very difficult issue. Similarly, there were some strong views from the Australian Federal Police Association and I certainly have considerable sympathy for them. The late Kevin Dobson SM was often wont to say that police should not be expected to be blue punching bags; they have an entitlement to go about their duties without suffering injuries on a regular basis. When the old workers compensation legislation in the 80s went out, whatever leeway they might have had was lost and they did not have any means of getting any financial compensation, except through this act. There is some strength in that argument too. Interestingly, only two ambulance officers have had cause to access this act, having been assaulted by people who had taken drug overdoses. No firemen have had cause to access it, which is quite pleasing. I have sympathy with the government in its attempts to place everyone on a level playing field, but we need more evidence. The government needs to do more work before we proceed further.

I have made the comment that a number of witnesses felt that the scheme was a way for society to say sorry that the victim was victimised. I do not think society should be necessarily blamed for that. It is not the fault of society; it is usually the fault of the individual criminal, who goes out and maims or does some horrible nasty act to a particular victim. It is important—this came through in some of the evidence too—that rather than society being blamed it has some duty, some responsibility, to assist victims overcome the injuries they received. I certainly prefer the latter view rather than just blaming society. I think it misses the point. Society and parliaments such as ours do have to pick up the pieces and that is why we need a good scheme. I commend the committee’s report to the government.

MS TUCKER (12.18): I will make a couple of points that I think Mr Stefaniak did not cover. He has obviously made some personal observations that are not particularly reflections of the Standing Committee on Legal Affairs as a whole. I stress that questions were raised through this process about the notion that we need to put all victims on an equal footing. That, of course, raises questions around trauma of particular crimes such as a sexual assault and domestic violence. Mr Stefaniak did talk about this as well. The committee stated:

In its report Equality before the Law: Women’s Equality, the Australian Law Reform Commission recommended an alternative approach:

To achieve equality for women the law must be capable of responding to the situation and experiences of women. This requires the starting point to be the effects of a law, policy or program and its social context. For that legal analysis must move away from principles that require a superficial comparison with men to a more

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