Page 4108 - Week 13 - Thursday, 6 December 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Bill agreed to.
Victims of Crime Amendment Bill 2007
Debate resumed from 15 November 2007, on motion by Mr Corbell:
That this bill be agreed to in principle.
MR STEFANIAK (Ginninderra—Leader of the Opposition) (5.21): The opposition will be moving several amendments to this bill, which I think are very important in relation to making it a bit more compatible with what occurs around the rest of Australia. The bill was flagged in the budget and is to raise $500,000 a year to help victims of crime. No-one can quibble with helping victims of crime, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, but there are a few issues in relation to this which I want to touch on.
The bill introduces a levy of $10 right across the board on court-imposed fines for criminal offences, traffic offences and traffic infringement notices to fund victim services. I understand there are some categories which it does not cover, especially parking infringement notices, and thank God for that. Other states have not dissimilar schemes, except that all states that I discussed with the officers from the department—I thank the Attorney-General for making them available—have a graduated levy.
Whilst I can see the superficial logic in what the Attorney-General has done here in terms of it being administratively easier for the fines to be collected by the court and for the levy to be tacked on to infringement notices when they are paid so it can then be sent off to consolidated revenue, it does not really reflect the gravity of offences, as the schemes in other states do. For example, in South Australia, they have a levy in relation to a summary offence of $20 if it is an infringement, $70 if it goes to court and $120 for an indictable. For a young person there is a levy of $20 or a maximum of $40 per conviction. Similarly, in the Northern Territory it is $60 for an indictment and other offences are $40. In New South Wales, whilst it does not have quite the same scheme as anyone else—it is more of a compensation levy—someone sentenced to a term of imprisonment pays $70 and the levy is $30 in terms of summary convictions.
As I said, our scheme is $10 across the board. That means that someone who is fined for selling drugs or perhaps committing an assault and robbery—I am just trying to think of the things people have been fined for in the ACT courts, and they can include quite serious offences—will be treated the same as someone who commits a speeding offence. Because you drive along that way, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, you might be familiar with the speed camera outside of Hume which gets a few people—probably not yourself. People driving along there at 85 kilometres an hour are pinged for doing 85 in an 80 zone, and they are going to pay the same levy as someone who actually commits a real crime and creates real victims.
You would have to say some traffic infringement notices would be issued where a person is driving in such a crazy manner there is a real potential for someone to be the victim of that action, but there are many traffic offences that are effectively victimless crimes. They are not the ones where a person would be driving more than
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .