Page 2233 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 9 May 2012
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
Mr Corbell spent a lot of time justifying his remarks by saying that Victoria and New South Wales do not do a very good job of collecting this information as well. Victoria and New South Wales, respectively, have three million and six million people. They have a complex court system which is divided across jurisdictions and districts and the like. They have intermediate court systems. We are a city-state of 360,000 people, with essentially a unified court system, a close to unified court system, and a unified courts administration system. So to go to a 2007 report into the Bail Act in Victoria and hang your hat on that as an excuse for why we in the ACT do not collect this data is a disgrace.
That report has been out since 2007. It is lightly relevant, only passingly relevant, to the ACT. This minister has been Attorney-General for all the time that that review in Victoria has been on the table, and he comes in here today, five years down the track from the tabling of that report, and says that because they do not do it in Victoria we cannot do it here.
The whole premise of the debate here today and the motion that I moved today is to provide the baseline data and put it out in the public arena. The public has the perception that there is a revolving door when it comes to bail. I suspect, from my experience and from my research, that the public is right in this. But, instead of making assertions, we want the data.
Later in his remarks Mr Corbell said that the improvements in policing were a direct result of improvements in bail administration. How do we know if we do not have the data? If we believe the first thing that Mr Corbell said, that we cannot get this by the press of a button, how do we know that his later assertion is correct? We do not know. The community does not know. This motion today was a request, an apparently simple request, to provide the community with data on the operation of the Bail Act. And it boils down to, as Mr Hanson rightly said, this: it is too hard for this government to do anything about it; it does not want to send somebody in to manually go through the records.
This community deserve to know. This community need to know whether their assessment that they are increasingly unsafe because of the failures of the bail law—that is their perception—is borne out by the facts. And this minister will not provide it, and he is aided and abetted in this by the Greens.
The Greens wring their hands and say, “It is terrible that we do not have this data,” but they are not doing anything to require him to do it. If the minister came in here and said, “This is really difficult to do and I cannot do it by 5 June,” perhaps we would have considered another date. But he did not. He came in here and said, “I will not do it because I cannot do it at the press of a button.” And the Greens, through Mr Rattenbury, let him get away with it.
Let us look at what we have here today. We do not know whether the bail system is improving or not, we do not know whether the bail system is aiding the criminal justice system or not, because we do not have the baseline data from the government. We have made a large number of changes to the Bail Act. The minister, by his own
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video