Page 730 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 1 April 2008
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offensive behaviour. In fact, police out on the street are trained in terms of what case law affects their actions, so that certainly would be implanted, I think, in the mind of every general duty officer who goes out there and has cause to, at this stage, arrest people for offensive behaviour. So I reject what Mr Corbell says in relation to that. He does it in a convoluted way and he cannot really have it both ways.
Similarly, with fighting in a public place: from what he was saying, it is something where the police turn up and, if it is a minor thing, they will caution people. I note that Mr Corbell is not seeking to remove section 391, fighting in a public place. But he is harping on that, if it is an assault, it is a lot more serious and people should be charged with that and, if it is not serious, police will probably caution people and that will be the end of it. He is not seeking to remove section 391—and it is there for a purpose. It is for those more minor cases—street offences, offences where people are causing other law-abiding citizens a lot of angst but where the offences are not necessarily of the same category as those where someone may deliberately beat the hell out of someone else and should be charged with grievous bodily harm, assault occasioning bodily harm, wounding with intent or some other much more serious offence covered in the Crimes Act.
The offence of fighting in a public place over the years has proven a very effective tool to stop a situation getting worse. It invariably covers people who are drunk, not doing a huge amount of harm to each other but just being an absolute darn nuisance, and where there is potential indeed for further, more serious incidents to occur. Mr Mulcahy gave an interesting analogy about the fight at Manuka. No-one was charged there, but, if there had been two people just having a blue outside a night establishment, that may well have been a most appropriate matter for them to either be charged or, probably better still, as we are suggesting, have an infringement notice to defuse the situation, to ensure that it does not get any worse but an appropriate level of punishment is inflicted.
Frequently, we will see people fighting in a public place, which is quite different from people actually assaulting each other, and police are well aware of that. This has been an offence that has been on the statute books for decades. It was in the old summary offences ordinance when I first started prosecuting here in 1979; it came from the New South Wales summary police act, police offences act, which goes back, I think, to about 1898. It has been around that long. It is a tried and proven minor offence. I have known people—I must confess friends of mine—who have been charged with this and paid their $4 fine or whatever it was. They were full of grog and bad manners when they were 19, and it had a salient effect on them. It also perhaps stopped situations from accelerating and getting much more serious.
It is a very important tool for police to have as an offence. I think even Mr Corbell accepts the huge problems in terms of the time it takes for police being taken off the beat with some of these offences when they could be dealt with in a much more expeditious way, such as infringement notices. He obviously must accept that; otherwise we would not be debating this bill today. So why on earth has he not put in the two main offences that the police would like to see? This is one of them; the other one, of course, is offensive behaviour?
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