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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Tuesday, 24 August 2004) . . Page.. 4075 ..

Sentencing is a very complex issue. The criminal justice system is a very complex area that governments, courts, individuals and society have to contend with, but I think that this scheme will have a positive effect. The opposition is happy to support the scheme. We look forward to seeing how it actually operates in practice. It is not the be-all and end-all, but it is a useful addition to the criminal justice system and we support it.

MS TUCKER (5.21): The Greens will be supporting this bill in principle, but I will be moving amendments in the detail stage. This bill is a very important piece of legislation. Restorative justice has been demonstrated to have quite a profound impact on many of the problems of our criminal justice system. Diversionary programs developed by the police and community members have been in operation in the ACT and circle sentencing for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in the ACT commenced recently. This bill is an important step forward in that it sets out a broad program involving the whole-of-government criminal justice system and has a statutory basis, so the Assembly is formally engaged with this subject for the first time.

Professor John Braithwaite has done a lot of work at the ANU on what works and what does not, and theories to explain why, as has Heather Strang. Professor Braithwaite chaired the group that worked on the issues paper but, since then, following the focus groups that brought in various community groups, the department, as I understand it, has taken that input and shaped this system.

The Greens support restorative justice for its great capacity to have a humanising effect on dealing with wrongs between people for all the people affected. That means the person who committed the wrong, that person’s family, friends and so on and the person or people directly affected—the victims, for want of a better word—and their friends and family. It can also work when the perpetrator of a crime is apprehended before there is a victim.

That is important because we know that a criminal justice system based on the punishment of imprisonment and dealing with wrongs through an adversarial formal court creates its own problems for all that we value in the system. We know that the results for society are not good when we send people to prison for a crime and the end result of that is the use of illegal drugs. However, having said that, we now need to consider carefully the details of the particular proposal in this bill.

It is good to see the reviews built into this scheme. It is particularly pleasing that the criteria for evaluation are on the table at the beginning, which should mean that the necessary data collection and observation will be built into the system right from the start. Creating a centralised public service unit will be helpful, I believe, in developing knowledge and expertise, keeping up with research, monitoring, and developing a consistent approach to decisions on the suitability of particular people and cases for conferencing.

Whilst it is not specifically set out in the legislation, it seems logical for this unit to have responsibility for the monitoring and evaluation of the scheme and for responding early to any identified problems. Whilst restorative justice holds a lot of promise as an alternative or an addition to the problems of the court system, we need to be mindful of the interaction between these two systems and of not losing the protections of justice that have been developed over a long history of practice.

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