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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 09 Hansard (Wednesday, 18 August 2004) . . Page.. 3865 ..

Clauses 6 to 14 negatived.

Clause 15 negatived.

Remainder of bill, by leave, taken as a whole.

MR SPEAKER: The question is:

That the remainder of the bill be agreed to.

Question resolved in the negative.

MR SPEAKER: The question now is:

That the bill as a whole, as amended, be agreed to.

MR SMYTH (Leader of the Opposition) (3.40): I take this opportunity to thank members for their support for the bill. It sets out a clear path forward that I think would take the ACT a quantum leap ahead of all other jurisdictions. In June 2003, over a year ago, I introduced this bill in the Assembly. The reaction in the community was overwhelmingly positive. The few criticisms that have been received from the community have been comprehensively addressed in the amendments that have been agreed to. I note that this bill received in-principle support. I am particularly pleased that in debate I shattered Ms Dundas’s illusions as to the Liberal Party’s lock them up mentality.

As it has taken us 18 months to get to this point we have to establish what the government has done in the corrections field. The answer is very little. There has been some juvenile swaggering about a prison site, but there has been no attempt to achieve corrections reform in the term of this Assembly. It is patently obvious in the exposure drafts of the Crimes (Sentencing) Bill 2004 and the Crimes (Sentence Administration) Bill that they got an airing only because the government knew I was bringing this bill back on for debate.

What makes the government’s slovenly approach even more reprehensible is the fact that the Crimes (Sentencing) Bill does almost nothing in the corrections field other than pinch a couple of ideas that have been taken out of my reforming bill. The 300 pages of the Crimes (Sentence Administration) Bill just show the incredibly turgid nature of this minister. On first blush it would appear as though the minister had to produce over 300 pages to accomplish what has been achieved in the mere 18 pages of this bill. That says a lot about the different approaches of the Labor Party and the Liberal Party.

As a result of this government’s inadequacies, this bill represents the way forward in corrections. I thank members for approving of certain clauses today, as they are an important part of the reforming practice. They set down the principles that we want to achieve and how we want to achieve them. They should have been in place a long time ago. The Labor Party, in its election material, said that that is exactly what it would do. It would come up with programs that were required, it would design a jail based on that and then it would pick a site. Unfortunately, all it has done to date is pick a site.

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