Page 6052 - Week 14 - Thursday, 9 December 2010
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I will talk members through each of the amendments in turn.
Firstly, the bill proposes to reintroduce the offence of bestiality into the Crimes Act 1900. The reintroduced offence will criminalise all sexual activities between a person and an animal and will be punishable by a maximum of 10 years imprisonment.
As the imprisonment penalties across Australian jurisdictions are diverse for bestiality offences, ranging from three years in the Northern Territory to 21 years in Tasmania, the ACT’s proposed maximum penalty of 10 years has been deemed appropriate as it is consistent with the territory’s existing sexual offences in the Crimes Act.
I can advise members that historically the ACT had an offence of bestiality and buggery, which was located at section 79 of the Crimes Act. This offence was repealed in November 1985, prior to the ACT attaining self-government.
The reintroduced bestiality offence has been broadly drafted to include all sexual activities between a person and an animal. This broad definition is distinct from the definitions in many Australian jurisdictions, where the offences only include the penetration of or by an animal as the behaviour which is criminalised by the offence. The ACT will join South Australia as the only jurisdictions which state that bestiality includes any sexual activity between a person and an animal.
I can advise members that the government had been working towards the reintroduction of this offence prior to the recent publicity relating to this issue. The reintroduced offence and the scope of and penalty for the offence had been proposed without influence from the recent publicity. However, it is timely to be reminded why an offence such as this is important and to have the community squarely behind the introduction of the offence.
In the course of investigating the breadth of the bestiality offence, a Queensland case came to attention, involving an offender forcing his daughter into sexual acts with an animal. This case gave rise to the second amendment proposed by this bill.
In order to ensure that serious sexual offending of this manner is captured by the territory’s existing criminal laws, this bill proposes to amend the definition of sexual intercourse at section 50B of the Crimes Act. The definition is to be amended to specifically state that an “object” includes an animal.
The third proposed amendment is to clarify the fault element at section 60 of the Crimes Act. Section 60 creates the sexual offence of an act of indecency on or in the presence of another person and the offence of an act of indecency in company. Both of the offences state that the required fault element is knowledge or recklessness.
The Supreme Court has raised a concern with duplicity in relation to section 60 because of the inclusion of both knowledge and recklessness as fault elements. Previously, this issue was discussed in the case of the Queen and Maddison, which raised concern with the inclusion of both of these fault elements in another section of the Crimes Act. The court determined that, where both the fault elements of knowledge and recklessness are stated in the offence, questions of duplicity are raised.
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