Page 3511 - Week 09 - Thursday, 21 August 2008
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While I wholeheartedly agree with the aim of lifting conviction rates and improving the court experience for victims of crime, I do regrettably have some serious concerns about this particular bill. I appreciate the briefing from Mr Corbell’s staff and JACS officials and while that briefing and the government’s amendments address some of these issues, I have proposed some further amendments to some aspects of the bill which I will discuss in the detail stage.
I have heard conflicting reports on the consultation on this bill. The department has assured me that the standard consultation was undertaken as with any piece of legislation. That said I have also heard that there was minimal consultation on the bill itself and that most of the consultation was actually for the SARP report. While I do acknowledge that a large number of groups were consulted on the SARP report, they were primarily victims groups and parties interested in prosecution. As Mr Ken Archer notes in his submission, the consultation list is of very like-minded people. Defence counsel and other parties likely to defend the rights of the accused were underrepresented.
Also, this bill proposes amendments to areas of ACT legislation that were not fully discussed in the consultation on the SARP report and therefore have not had the same level of community scrutiny as the changes suggested by SARP. I appreciate that the Attorney-General and his department have made some effort since the bill was introduced to speak with these groups and to listen to their concerns.
Although I have not been privy to many of the submissions and the concerns submitted to the Attorney-General about the bill, I have seen some very alarmed responses from various parties—the Human Rights Commission, Civil Liberties Australia and some prominent ACT legal practitioners, to name a few. I am surprised that the government could attach a human rights compatibility statement to this bill when the Human Rights Commission submission raised such glaring concerns which, I am pleased to see, have been somewhat addressed. Why were these groups not involved in discussions in the planning stage of such significant changes to our court procedures?
I believe the protection of victims is vital. No doubt I will be unpopular in some circles for criticising this bill, and I do not want to be seen as fighting for the perpetrators of assault because I am not. I am arguing for the right to a fair trial for both the complainant and the accused. As it stands, I believe there are aspects of this bill that undermine basic civil liberties and, according to a number of legal practitioners, also undermine many aspects of the court process.
The bill is well intentioned and had it been more carefully drafted after more comprehensive and more focused consultation I believe it would unquestionably be a welcome step towards improving the court process for victims of violent crime, but unamended it has the potential to raise more problems than it fixes. I ask the government to reconsider pushing this bill through today and to postpone its passage until the community has been given adequate time to fully consider the impact of the actual proposed changes in this bill.
I am not alone in suspecting that this bill has been hastily finalised with an eye to deflecting some criticism of the abysmally low conviction rate for violent sexual
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