Page 731 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 1 April 2008
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My bill, which apparently now is going to be decided afterwards—I think that is putting the cart before the horse, but not to worry—would separate offensive behaviour into offensive language and offensive behaviour. But that is not going to happen; we are to have just offensive behaviour. We have a Supreme Court case on that. The case law is quite clear. The ability of police to exercise a discretion too, I would hope, is quite clear.
Mr Corbell did seem to be at pains to assure us that this in no way is a reflection on the police. Well, unfortunately, Mr Corbell, of course it is. If it is all right for police to actually pin someone with an infringement notice for urinating in a public place but not do so for fighting in a public place or offensive behaviour, I think you have real problems in drawing a distinction. Again, offensive behaviour is defined by the Supreme Court; it is a term that has been well used through the courts. Again, it is broad and again it gets back to the discretion of police officers who on a daily basis face these problems and do it very, very well—a job, I am sure, none of us would want to have.
Again I stress that I spoke to probably over a hundred police officers in terms of what would be a good way, what we can do to assist, what would be good legislative changes, and when they mentioned on-the-spot fines they all mentioned the offence of offensive behaviour. In fact, that was probably about the first offence that they mentioned as needing on-the-spot fines, because it is probably the most common offence—I think a lot more common perhaps than things like urinating in a public place or perhaps even people drinking in public places, although obviously you will get a splurge of that at maybe some major events. So that is good law.
The four offences Mr Corbell has here are fine; they are worthy of on-the-spot fines. But he is missing out basically two of the main ones and really the most important one is the cover-all offence of offensive behaviour. I cannot think of any other group in our community, in our society, more capable of exercising the discretion and exercising it on the spot—they do it, day in, day out—than our well-trained and, might I say, well-regarded police force.
You have your protection in there, Mr Corbell, with the Ombudsman looking at all this. I assume this is going to be exactly like the move-on powers, when we had a similar 12-month thing there as a compromise so that they were not being abused. After about 2,600 incidents of people being moved on and not one instance of abuse, it was given a clean bill of health. I am sure you are going to get that from the Ombudsman. I am sure that provision is fairly superfluous, but you have got it there and, okay, you see that as some sort of a protection. But, if that serves as protection, why not, if you are worried about police exercising a discretion—and I assure you I do not think you have any need to be—include these two offences, which the police themselves want? The police are the ones who have to deal with this. The police on the beat are basically the experts. You are not going to do anything in terms of infringing anyone’s civil liberties by doing this, because, at the end of the day, if an offender does not like it, they can go to court and have a hearing, just like if you go through a red light, or you speed, and you do not agree with it, you can go to court and have a hearing.
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