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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Tuesday, 24 August 2004) . . Page.. 4072 ..

apologised and when they truly felt sorry for the decision. If all of those things were happening, the chances of reoffending were reduced.

This study in particular makes it clear that restorative justice is helpful in reducing the rates of reoffending, but it is perhaps more important that we address the causes of offending in the first place. More can always been done to address poverty and unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, and we simply cannot afford to allow the cuts and underspending we have for crime prevention programs. We do need to focus more on our crime prevention programs and make sure that we have the concepts in place that actually divert people from crime before they undertake that first criminal activity.

This bill is a commendable move by the government in relation to restorative justice and reoffending, but I for one would like to see more happening with actually targeting offending behaviour before it happens. Tinkering around the edges to prevent reoffending is all well and good, but we need to focus on crime prevention. If we do not focus on crime prevention in the first place, there really is not much point in continuing to work on all of these restorative justice and reoffending programs because we will continually have more people coming into contact with the criminal justice system, more work for our courts and more work for our police. That is something that I think needs to be reprioritised, especially by this government.

MR STEFANIAK (5.10): Mr Speaker, the opposition will be supporting this bill. In fact, if you look at the justice policy that we released recently, you will find that this is one of the approaches that we feel is very important in terms of the full sentencing process. I must say that I have detected in the ACT over a 20 to 25-year period—perhaps it extends to the rest of Australia—a lessening of community confidence in the judicial system. One area in which there seems to be a lack of confidence is in relation to sentencing, often for very good reason.

Often the forgotten people in the process are the victims. I think that victims often do feel as if they have been badly let down by the system. One of the big problems, of course, with serious offences is that the victims feel let down by the fact that often the offender just seems to walk away with little, if any, punishment. That is of great concern to the community.

It is particularly important in looking at a bill such as this one to see how many people are proposed to be affected by it, what it actually does for victims and what benefit it is going to provide to our system. On balance, it looks as if this bill will have some considerable benefits to our system. The government has indicated that initially it will start the process with juveniles, but it will probably end up in dealing with about 200 cases annually, representing about 5 to 10 per cent of the existing case numbers that go before the courts.

The system augments the criminal justice system. I have benefited from being a member of the scrutiny of bills committee and looking at the report there and I accept that it does augment the criminal justice system. For indictable offences, I have been advised, it can only occur if a person pleads guilty or is found guilty. For minor offences—indeed, for lots of young persons—it is inherently diversionary, but the system is more than just

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