Page 566 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 10 February 2009
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It is not sufficient to say, as the attorney has, “It is a problem with the law. It is not a problem with the practice,” because we have different prosecutorial cultures in different jurisdictions, in the same way as we have different judicial cultures in different jurisdictions. New South Wales has a much more rigorous and inclined towards incarceration judicial culture than we have in the ACT and have ever had in the ACT. And that is part of the history of New South Wales and its violent past and its violent origins. The ACT does not have that. We need to look at what is different and what is special about the ACT and make sure that we come up with the right approach.
I have found, over the six or eight weeks since this piece of legislation was introduced, that there are enough issues of concern in the community for it to be better for them to be canvassed in an open way. We should use the mechanisms of a committee in an appropriate way and in a way that has been foreshadowed by the Greens in their commitment to open government, and in the way that I have long advocated the committees should be used in this place—to get to the bottom of issues. This will be an opportunity and this, I hope, will be a template for the way that we deal with a lot of legislation in this place.
In the last four years, legislation was not referred to committees or was referred very rarely. I have on occasions referred members to the practice in the New Zealand parliament, which also is a unicameral parliament, where every piece of legislation, unless it is declared urgent, is referred to an appropriate committee for investigation and report before it is dealt with. We may not want to go that far down the path. But this is momentous legislation. This is legislation about the most serious crime on our books, with the largest penalty, and it behoves us to make sure that we get it right. That is why we are referring it to a committee.
I notice that the minister has circulated an amendment to foreshorten the reporting date to June. I will foreshadow now, to save me speaking again, that that is not acceptable. I have had some discussions with a range of people about the time that this would require. The Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety is already a busy committee and it has, in addition to annual reports, a substantial inquiry into the Alexander Maconochie Centre delays. It behoves us to do this right.
We picked the end of September because that gives the government an opportunity to respond and still deal with this matter inside this calendar year, if they so choose, if it is necessary to make further amendments. But June has real problems, especially in relation to the fact that in most of May the committee cannot meet because the estimates committee will be underway. I commend the motion to the house.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (8.41): I rise to speak very briefly to Mrs Dunne’s motion, just to flag that the Greens intend to support this motion. I think it is very important that this bill goes to the committee, as I spoke to during my earlier comments.
The particular reason I have for saying that is in some way reinforced by the attorney’s comments about consultation in which he said, “In the same week that I introduced the new legislation into parliament, I wrote to the stakeholders seeking
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