Page 3586 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 21 November 2007
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terms of the Criminal Code. Probably the most significant part of it, which I will deal with first, relates to the standard non-parole periods. These are working well in New South Wales. The New South Wales legislation has been largely duplicated by this part of the package. It will see standard non-parole periods—that is, the time that a criminal actually spends in jail—introduced for a number of serious offences. The courts must use these standard periods when setting a non-parole period unless there are mitigating or aggravated circumstances in the case that justify a court deviating from the standard non-parole period.
Those standard non-parole periods are: for murder, 25 years for a special category of public officers such as police, emergency services workers, doctors, nurses, judicial officers and teachers; for murder in other cases, 20 years; for attempted murder, 10 years; for gang rape or rape in the first degree, 15 years; for intentionally inflicting grievous bodily harm, seven years; for aggravated armed robbery, which is with a weapon and someone is injured, seven years; for aggravated burglary, if serious injury is caused to a person, seven years; for carjacking, which is a new offence which I am including in this package, three years or, if it is committed in aggravated circumstances involving injuries, five years; for burglary, if the offender has been convicted of a burglary offence in the previous five years, one year; for supplying more than 50 times the trafficable quantity of a drug such as heroin or speed, 15 years; for supplying between 30 and 50 times the trafficable quantity, 10 years; and for supplying at least 20 but less than 30 times the trafficable quantity, five years.
Those last three are more of an extrapolation of the New South Wales drug provisions. New South Wales tends to have a lot more sections in its criminal law and acts than we do, so there is some extrapolation there. If you follow the New South Wales system, you will see that, for most types of murder, the courts will give that 20-year non-parole period. They will deviate from that. I have seen cases involving the battered wife syndrome, where the wife just snaps after taking a horrendous amount of violence from her dreadful husband, say, over a 10-year period and a court has given a suspended sentence because of those mitigating circumstances. In cases where the murder is particularly nasty and outside what the court regards as the norm, the courts will give a much lengthier non-parole period or, indeed, in some instances, none at all. So that discretion is there, but it is a guideline that people involved in the system in New South Wales, including even some practitioners from here, say works well. It gives a degree of certainty. There is the ability, depending on the case, to deviate from it.
It is not, as some opposite probably have said before, mandatory sentencing—nothing like it. It was introduced by Bob Carr and his government. But it does provide that certainty and it works well in the state that surrounds the ACT. I return to my earlier point: why on earth should someone sentenced in the Queanbeyan District Court or Supreme Court for a serious offence get a jail term while someone in the ACT Supreme Court sentenced for exactly the same offence committed in Fyshwick, a few miles across the border, gets a completely different sentence? It does not really make sense. Crime, of course, knows no boundaries. Especially in the case of the ACT, there is a large incidence of people committing crimes in both jurisdictions.
The other very important area relates to sentencing guidelines. The package enables our new court of appeal, which has been going for a few years, to issue guideline
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