Page 3723 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 24 August 2011
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MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER: Thank you. Mr Corbell.
MR CORBELL: The fact is that a majority of members of this place have to be ready to debate a bill before it is brought on for debate. It happens to the government frequently in this place, as I have just illustrated, that a large volume of legislation is on the notice paper but is not brought on for debate because other members have advised they are not yet in a position to debate it.
Mrs Dunne has been advised, both this week and last week, that the government and, I understand, the Greens are not prepared to debate her bill. But instead of accepting that and putting something else on the agenda paper and actually trying to use time wisely in this place, they have simply sought to grandstand on the issue by bringing the bill on, knowing and being advised in advance that neither the government nor, I understand, the Greens will support debate on the bill at this time. If they want to grandstand, that is their business. But I think the facts show just how shallow their motives are.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (10.59): The Greens will not be supporting the suspension of standing orders today. We have been clear with Mrs Dunne that we would be supporting the adjournment of the bill, and the reason we want to do that is that we believe there is a better way to go about this process, as has been alluded to and as I have spoken about publicly on a number of occasions. We remain open to considering this bill, and I want to be quite clear about that. But we think that there is a better way to approach the question of sentencing in the ACT, and that is why we will support the adjournment today.
We now face a situation in the Assembly where we have four different areas of sentencing before the Assembly. Particularly in this case, we saw the minister last week table a bill in a very similar vein to that which Mrs Dunne has on the table, and certainly my colleagues in the Greens and I are concerned that this way of going about it, sort of doing it on some ad hoc or piecemeal basis depending on what has been in the press or for a range of other motivations, is not necessarily the best way to go about sentencing. We certainly have thoughts about sentencing in the ACT and areas where there might be problems, and that warrants some further investigation. We are of the view that it would be a far better approach, rather than simply picking up bits and pieces, to sit down and say, “What are we trying to achieve with sentencing in the ACT? Where do we want to get to? What is currently working? What is currently not working? And therefore where does the Assembly want to go?”
This is not about outsourcing it to academics, as been suggested. It is about actually using the expert opinion that exists out there, the expert understanding, the expert evidence, to inform this Assembly of areas where we might have problems and then for the Assembly to make the judgement on what it wants to do with that.
But certainly one of the reasons that the Greens are not ready to debate this today is that we still do not understand what the difference is. Where is the evidence that increasing the penalties in this way will achieve the objectives that Mrs Dunne and her colleagues have in mind? Where is the research that shows that more than
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