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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Tuesday, 24 August 2004) . . Page.. 4080 ..

provide tacit permission to harass or humiliate anyone, nor does it allow any member of the community to take the law into his or her own hands. The expanded restorative justice system that we are debating this evening does not affect open justice or formal prosecution of crimes because the scheme does not intervene in the normal processes of criminal justice.

The expansion of restorative justice may lead—one hopes that it will—to cultural change. The new system has a greater coverage of offences, victims and offenders. It will place the onus upon the referring agency to take the initial action it believes is appropriate and, upon conclusion of the case, to determine its response if the outcomes are incomplete.

By expanding coverage to cases involving serious offences and adult offenders, such cases will be able to be referred to restorative justice during or after prosecution. In suitable cases, a restorative justice conference may be held in addition to the trial and sentencing of an offender. The restorative justice process is one that I think can be used by the criminal justice system to provide a more complete response to an offence in a way that increases the opportunities to satisfy victims, offenders and the community at large.

I might just say, acknowledging comments that have been made during the debate in relation to the sentencing review that the government has been involved in for some time, two years or thereabouts, that it is relevant to note that that sentencing review did, through its processes, lead to the development of the issues paper which is now being incorporated into legislation through this bill. There has been some implied and some quite direct criticism of the process that the government pursued in relation to sentencing. I think that with some of that criticism and some of the concerns that have been expressed about the time there has been a misunderstanding of the scope and the nature of the process and the scale of the task.

We have seen from exposure drafts that have been tabled by the government over the last six weeks the extent of the work involved in the review and the consolidation of the territory’s legislation in relation to sentencing. I might just say, without being unnecessarily defensive on behalf of officers, on behalf of the department of justice or, indeed, on my own behalf, that I think that the criticism is unwarranted and I certainly think that it is unfair. My comment on the unfairness is not so much in the context of unfairness to me, as I expect those sorts of responses. They are part and parcel, unfortunately, of the way we do business. But I really do think that it is unfair to the officers of the department of justice who have worked on the process for two years and have consulted broadly.

I do not think that there is a single stakeholder within the ACT community who not only has not been invited to be part and parcel of the process but also has chosen not to participate. We have brought together in a single piece of legislation all the law in the ACT relating to sentencing. I have indicated before that, essentially, that involved concertinaing and rationalising into a single piece of legislation 12 separate acts of the ACT. It was a major undertaking and we see that in the work that has been produced. The new sentencing package is close to 450 pages. I think that it is the single largest piece of legislation introduced into this Assembly in this term.

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