Page 3402 - Week 08 - Thursday, 23 August 2012
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increasing the penalties, and making them quite substantial penalties, we send that message. It is a message that we should be prepared to send loud and clear to people who distribute, sell and purvey these games in the ACT—that we take it seriously, that we take seriously our responsibility to keep these R18+ materials out of the hands of minors.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services and Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development) (3.23): The government will not be supporting these late amendments from Mrs Dunne. The reason for that is the need for consistency in relation to penalty provisions.
The current provisions that attract a penalty unit level of 100 penalty units for an individual are for material which is refused classification or material that is unclassified—that is, it has not been submitted at all to the classification scheme. X18+ material is 50 penalty units—not 100; 50. The government’s view is that to provide for the penalties for R18+ computer games being sold to minors to be at the same level as refused classification is not the appropriate standard. Selling refused classification material or material which has not been classified at all, has not been subject to classification at all, should have a higher penalty than selling material that has been classified but is being sold to someone who is not legally allowed to obtain it.
So the government does not support the proposal from Mrs Dunne. It is important to remember what Mrs Dunne’s amendments would do. Mrs Dunne’s amendments in relation to penalty units would equate an R18+ computer game with material that is classified RC; that is, games that, if classified RC, would:
• depict, express or otherwise deal with matters of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or abhorrent phenomena, in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults to the extent that they should not be accorded a classification … or
• describe or depict in a way that is likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult, a person who is, or appears to be, a child under 18 … (whether the person is engaged in sexual activity or not) … or
• promote, incite or instruct in matters of crime or violence …
They are the criteria for material to be refused classification. Sale of that material attracts 100 penalty units. That is a higher and more serious matter than the sale of R18+ computer game material to a minor. I am not saying that that action in and of itself is not a serious matter, but there should be an appropriate grading of the seriousness of the offence provisions.
Mrs Dunne is seeking to equate one action with another; they are not the same in terms of their seriousness and they should not be accorded the same penalty units. So the government does not support the amendments.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (3.27): The effect of the amendments from Mrs Dunne would be to double the penalties for selling R18+ video games to children.
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