Page 5813 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 7 December 2010
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have taken a lot of the early steps that can be taken—the massive uptake of recycling in this territory is a credit to the systems that were set up and the Canberrans who have so enthusiastically participated. But we are now up to those levels where we have to start focusing on some of the smaller and trickier bits. Something like plastic bags is not a massive part of the market, but it is a next step. As I said at the beginning, it is an incremental step towards making a better world.
A couple of arguments have come up this morning which warrant some discussion. The argument about penalties is extraordinary. As a lawyer, as a man who worked in the Attorney-General’s Department, I would expect better from the Leader of the Opposition. These penalties are clearly the maximum available penalties. Anybody who has studied the law would know—frankly, most people who have not studied law know this as well because it is common sense—these are maximum available penalties. Judges have discretion when a matter comes before the court to impose a suitable penalty within a range.
We have to look at these arguments about some poor shop assistant being whacked with a $27,500 penalty with a check of reality. Firstly, it will possibly never come to that. The Office of Regulatory Services, which has the responsibility for enforcing these laws, is not draconian. It recognises that you have to take businesses and stakeholders with you, and it will work with people. We have seen that in Ms Le Couteur’s detailed examples around the implementation of the egg labelling laws. We have seen there an effective program of the ORS working with stakeholders to make those laws work in an effective way.
We are about the see the liquor laws come into effect. ORS is out there working with licence holders to effectively bring those laws into place. They are not going to slap them with penalties in the first week of the law coming into effect. They are going to work with them and tell them where the problems are. Where an organisation or an individual continues to fail to comply or refuses to comply, then the penalties will come into effect. A little bit of common sense needs to be used, and I think ORS does that. I think the Liberal Party should give it a little bit more credit for having that common sense.
That is the first part—it is never going to come to that. Secondly, as I have touched on, this is about maximum penalties. If it comes before a magistrate, the magistrate is going to be able to use the discretion granted under the normal operations of the judicial system to work out whether somebody has made a reasonable and honest mistake—it is worth noting that strict liability offences contain a defence of reasonable and honest mistake—or whether somebody is wilfully breaching a clear policy direction that this Assembly has sought to put in place.
We also need to draw out the distinction between fines for corporations and fines for individuals. The hysterical suggestion of some poor shop assistant getting a $27,500 fine is embarrassing, and it does no credit to this place to see those sorts of arguments put on the table.
I want to come back to that central point of what we are trying to do here today—that is, to ban an outdated technology and to push this community towards better
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