Page 3023 - Week 09 - Thursday, 21 September 2006
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and less concerned about the rights of offenders and you need to toughen your laws so that powerful messages are sent to the community.
How do you get through to young drivers sitting in pubs with their hot cars outside? We can hardly put out an education program. They could not give a toss about that. What you have to have, minister, is tough law and that tough law needs to be communicated to the community. That is the only way you will get the message through to these recidivist offenders.
Minister, we will come back to this place and seek to have these laws tightened. In the meantime, we would ask you to do something about these laws, to toughen these laws, to do something about forfeiture so that you are better able to protect our community, minister, and perhaps minimise the amount of correspondence you and I are both getting about hoon driving and burnouts in our suburbs.
Mr Hargreaves: I do not get any.
MR PRATT: Maybe people do not like you any more, minister, and do not bother writing to you, but the opposition is getting a truckload of this stuff. We are getting a truckload of correspondence from Canberra residents saying—
Mr Gentleman: A truckload!
MR PRATT: A slowly driven truck too, Mr Gentleman. People are dissatisfied that middle to lower level crime, particularly around car offences, simply has not reduced over the last five years. They are getting emotionally tired about the fact that there is no impact on recidivist offenders. As to ramping up police numbers, I offer my congratulations on the increased police patrols that I have seen. I actually saw five interventions in Manuka in one hour last Friday and I was super impressed. See if you can sustain that, minister. But, concurrent with that, you need to toughen your legislation. People need to know that if they are going to offend they will have their cars sold, not that they may be sold or, depending on the circumstances, that a judge might think about doing so. So let’s see those laws toughened up.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (11.39): I would like to put forward a refreshing counter, perhaps, to Mr Pratt’s approach. This bill simply clears up an anomaly whereby cars that have been confiscated by the police might, due to the time it sometimes takes to process cases before the courts, have remained in police hands for a longer time than the legal penalty allows.
The presentation speech and the explanatory statement make reference to the fact that the confiscation provisions themselves have some unresolved human rights implications. Car confiscation measures were first introduced in the ACT in an attempt to address the problem of burnouts. The provisions of a bill brought forward in 1998 by independent MLA Dave Rugendyke and passed in 1999 were expanded by urban services minister Mr Smyth in 2000 to include road rage. The Greens opposed these bills at the time, essentially on the grounds that other legislation already existed to deal with the issues and that there were too many unresolved civil liberty and human rights-related issues. Labor opposed the Rugendyke bill but supported the Liberal government’s road rage
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