Page 580 - Week 02 - Thursday, 6 March 2008
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calls from the Children’s Court and the Supreme Court for consistency of sentencing dispositions and availability of dispositions to young offenders.
This bill achieves that goal by enabling the availability of sentencing dispositions that are currently limited to adults, along with the sentencing dispositions that are specifically relevant to children. For example, the Children’s Court and the Supreme Court will be able to impose a good behaviour order with a range of tailored conditions, such as an educational condition, an accommodation condition, a rehabilitation condition, or any combination of conditions. The court will have the ability to impose place restriction and non-association orders on young offenders or to sentence a young offender to a suspended sentence or a deferred sentence order. It will also be open to the court to sentence a young offender to a term of periodic detention if the person turns 18 during the term of the sentence.
The bill will abolish the old remission schemes for sentences of imprisonment and replace it with a scheme requiring sentencing courts to consider placing young offenders on a good behaviour order, with a supervision condition to commence at the end of a term of imprisonment. This is a practice that the Children’s Court uses at present and we believe that it is an appropriate means to supervise a young person’s return to the community.
The bill enhances the Children’s Court as a specialist court for dealing with young offenders in care and protection matters. The court will have the jurisdiction to hear any criminal prosecution relating to any crime allegedly committed by a person who was under 18 years of age at the time of the offence. The only exception to this rule would be offences that are punishable by life imprisonment, which must be heard by the Supreme Court. However, the court will have the power to impose a sentence up to and including two years imprisonment. If the Children’s Court thinks that a sentence of more than two years imprisonment might be appropriate then it will have the power to commit the matter to the Supreme Court. Further, young people charged before the Children’s Court would retain the right to elect to have a charge for an indictable offence heard before a jury in the Supreme Court.
The bill also consolidates and modernises provisions that govern the court procedures for matters involving children and young people. The procedures will be common to proceedings in both the Children’s Court and the Supreme Court. These amendments draw on the terms of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights in relation to how proceedings should be conducted when dealing with children and young people.
Attending court can be a confusing and intimidating experience for people generally, let alone for children and young people. The bill will enable the Children’s Court and the Supreme Court to develop common rules of court that account for the particular needs of children and young people.
In the area of childcare services, the bill introduces a number of significant policy changes in the regulation of services providing care for children. This is to increase transparency and consistency, reduce administrative burden and improve the quality of services provided. Childcare services will be required to comply with enforceable
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