Page 1566 - Week 05 - Thursday, 7 April 2005
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Remainder of bill, by leave, taken as a whole.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (5.30): Mr Speaker, I seek leave to move amendments 2 to 7 circulated in my name together.
Leave granted.
MRS DUNNE: I move amendments 2 to 7 circulated in my name [see schedule 1 on page 1583].
These six amendments relate to some of the dozen or so strict liability offences contained within this legislation. Some of these are pretty straightforward and quite simple and I do not have a particular problem with them. But, for instance, clause 46 makes it a strict liability offence to deface an identifying tag. I think anyone who has a rudimentary understanding of how things work in rural industries and the significance of brands, marks and tags would know that it is probably not a good idea to do that.
Often in the course of dealing with stock—and I have some experience in dealing with stock—ear tags and tail tags do get damaged. The thing is that this is a strict liability offence. If they are damaged and you could say who damaged them or who was around when they were damaged—they could be damaged in a crush and they could get damaged in loading and unloading—that person would be guilty of an offence, and there is no issue of whether he intended to damage them. This is the problem with strict liability offences, so I seek to omit that.
There is also an offence in clause 51 of failing to destroy a tag when it is necessary to do so. That again is a strict liability offence. If somebody writes to you and says, “Destroy the tag” and you do not do it, you are immediately guilty of an offence, for which there is a fine. But the thing is that it should, as far as I am concerned, be incumbent upon the authority that says “destroy the tag” to impress upon the person that they are instructing that that tag really does need to be destroyed, and why.
The thing is that people are busy around the farms. You see tail tags and ear tags—they do hang around the place—and that is an offence. The person responsible for that will be found guilty of an offence and fined, I think, 50 penalty units—but I will just check that—because he did not actually get around to destroying it. Yes, there are issues, but we should be really concerned about the intent—whether somebody really did intend to do something nefarious by not destroying a tail tag. There are problems with not destroying tail tags but the “you haven’t done it so we’ll have you for 50 penalty units” does not seem to be appropriate.
In clause 70 there is the issuing of a fine in an emergency situation. People can require you to do particular things in an emergency and, if you do not do it, you are subject to a strict liability offence. Slapping a fine on somebody in the middle of an emergency is not going to stop the spread of foot-and-mouth disease or BSE in this country. As I said before, afterwards if somebody is found to have done something wrong, by all means take them to court and establish intent. But slapping a fine on somebody in the heat of the moment is not actually going to solve the problem that we are facing. The problem that we would be facing is not whether someone does something stupid but whether or
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