Page 2926 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 August 2013
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This will assist in the enforcement of drug and drink-driving legislation and also enhance the delivery of road safety in the ACT.
The provision of an additional four dedicated vehicles with recognition and analysis of plates identified cameras, or RAPID technology cameras, will allow police to instantaneously identify if vehicle registration is identical to one on a vehicle-of-interest list. This includes up-to-date listings of unregistered vehicles, stolen vehicles, vehicles owned by suspended or unlicensed drivers and vehicles associated with persons wanted on a warrant. This is all about ensuring more police, higher police visibility and safer roads for the community.
The government is also implementing the measures adopted by this Assembly for mandatory alcohol interlocks. Some $1.5 million over four years is being provided for the introduction of the mandatory alcohol interlock scheme to ensure that all ACT drivers convicted and found guilty of high-range and repeat drink-driving offences are required to have interlocks fitted to their vehicles. This tackles the particularly difficult issue of recidivist drink-driving and means Canberra’s streets are a safer place to drive as well as assisting those convicted of drink-driving offences with getting their driving behaviours back on track.
Some $1.5 million is being provided to replace and upgrade six fixed red light speed and six mobile cameras to ensure the technology remains capable and up to date. The government is introducing another of its election commitments with $4.4 million in revenue discounts over four years for the rewards for safer driving scheme, which will implement discounted drivers licence fees for those full licence holders who have had no demerit points and no traffic infringements for at least the last five years. The government believes it is important to send positive signals and reward good driving, and this initiative—a discount on drivers licence fees—is a direct and material way that we can demonstrate this reward. Of the almost 218,000 ACT drivers licence holders, approximately 61 per cent of them are anticipated to be potentially eligible for this discount.
As you can see, Madam Speaker, the government has a comprehensive program to address a range of issues, improve community safety, improve access to justice and improve the policing and community safety in our city.
I will turn to a couple of the issues raised in the estimates committee report. First of all, there was some commentary from the committee in relation to the issue of a fifth judge for the ACT. It is worth reiterating in this debate the rationale for the government’s position on not proceeding with the appointment of a fifth resident judge at this time. Comparisons of data between total lodgements—criminal and civil—per judicial officer show the ACT Supreme Court has a lower number of matters per judge than the superior courts of New South Wales, Tasmania, Queensland and South Australia. The ACT Supreme Court’s workload is only slightly higher than that of Victorian and Western Australian superior courts, and only the Northern Territory has a clearly lower workload.
This comparison shows efficiencies remain to be achieved in how the ACT Supreme Court deals with its civil and criminal lists as compared to other jurisdictions. It is
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