Page 5193 - Week 12 - Thursday, 27 October 2011
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The President of the Australian Lawyers Alliance has similarly stated, “Unfortunately what governments and oppositions have tended to do in Australia in the past few years is have knee-jerk reactions to incidents by simply increasing sentences for various offences when there’s no evidence that increased sentences including jail terms have any real impact.”
The common theme running though all these positions is that the organisations are open to changes to sentencing laws but only if they are supported by evidence that the change will better achieve one of the stated goals. The Greens position, as I think everyone in the chamber knows, is that we would prefer that the ACT perform a review of sentencing to gather evidence on how well sentences are meeting the purposes set out in the act. We believe the evidence the review would provide would better equip the Assembly for a debate on sentencing reform.
Coming back to some of those community organisations, I think each of those groups that I just cited indicated that they thought a sentencing review would be warranted in the ACT, as did the justice and community safety committee earlier in the term of this Assembly when they recommended such a review take place. Of course, it is a matter of history now that our proposal for a review was not agreed to by either of the other parties in this place last week. Accordingly, we will have to debate this bill as it currently stands and without what I think could have been valuable evidence to bring into the debate. When seen in this light and without any evidence to support it, the Greens have come to the inevitable conclusion that the bill should not be passed into law.
Those general comments aside, I think there are a number of specific flaws with the bill. The first I guess elaborates in more specific terms that first idea of the lack of supporting evidence. One of the issues raised by this bill is community expectations about the level of punishment that should be handed out for certain offences. The Attorney-General and the shadow attorney-general have both formed the view that the current level of sentences in the ACT for culpable driving are out of alignment with community standards. The Greens believe that this issue is worthy of further investigation before the Assembly passes this bill.
The question of what punishment the community expects in certain cases is an important one. The critical point the Greens emphasise is that it is informed community views that we should be looking for rather than an opinion that is perhaps formed on the facts as presented on the front page of a newspaper.
Members will recall receiving an email from the Chief Justice of the ACT Supreme Court alerting us to recent research in Tasmania on the views of jurors. The results really were quite striking. When asked in the abstract about sentencing in general, the jurors thought judges were too lenient. However, when asked about the case they actually sat through, and after hearing all the evidence, the jurors had very different views.
To summarise the results in broad terms, about half thought the judge was too harsh in his sentence and the other half thought the judge was too lenient. What this suggests is
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