Page 4109 - Week 13 - Thursday, 6 December 2007
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45 kilometres an hour above the speed limit and where they automatically lose their licence and are given a very high fine of about $1,500 or thereabouts. But many infringement notices are issued for offences at the absolute lowest end of the scale, and they just cannot in any way be compared with those I referred to earlier.
There is no way can that a person who commits a minor traffic infringement can be compared with someone who belts someone, breaks into a house or commits some other fairly heinous crime of violence or significant dishonesty and gets a fine. Of course, there is also no provision in terms of people who do even worse things and actually go to jail. My amendments seek to rectify those problems. I know the levy might be a little bit harder to collect, but, at the end of the day, it is a lot fairer because it means people who commit more serious offences are going to pay a bigger levy. That is only fair, and that is what happens in other states.
The other thing is that we are the only state or territory where young people will not have to pay the levy. A 17-year-old can commit just as nasty a crime as an 18-year-old and can drive just as crazily as an 18-year-old. It is only fair that we fall in line with every other state, but it is fair enough to have a provision where the court has discretion to exonerate someone under 18 if it thinks the circumstances of the case deem that necessary. That is a similar provision to the New South Wales scheme, and I have included that in the amendments.
I will go into them in a bit more detail when we come to them, but my amendments just make this a much better scheme than what it is. This is basically just a slug on a vast number of people, albeit for a very good cause, who are, in the main, committing victimless types of offences, and minor offences at that—infringement notices. The best you could say for it is that at least the government did not put the levy on parking offences. The vast majority of these fines will come from infringement notices, and infringement notices are those very, very minor offences. The reason for that is that the ACT does not collect many fines from its court system. We are a small jurisdiction. Perhaps they should use the fine provisions more, but, even then, you probably would not get up to the amount of money which the government seeks to raise here. Only about $250,000 a year is collected from court fines, and that figure has not moved, I do not think, in about 10 budgets. It would be minuscule if you just had that, and that is obviously why the Attorney-General has lumped in infringement notices.
We see that as a significant problem, and there is a considerable amount of unfairness as a result. Many of those offences are at the absolute bottom end of the scale in terms of offences. They are, effectively, infringements. There is a bit of double dipping there in terms of those offences. I would be very keen to look at other ways in which we could have a fairer scheme. This bill will obviously go through, but I certainly think the amendments I will move make it a much more realistic scheme and bring it into line with the schemes in other states and territories.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (5.28), in reply: I thank Mr Stefaniak for his support of this important piece of legislation. The Victims of Crime Amendment Bill 2007 introduces a $10 levy on all offences for which a court imposes a fine. The introduction of the levy was part of
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