Page 3234 - Week 10 - Thursday, 25 September 2014
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appear that the ACT drafters paid attention to concerns that were raised in the New South Wales scrutiny committee and were actually raised by my colleagues in the Greens in New South Wales and that those issues were picked up and addressed in the ACT draft. I commend both the drafters and Minister Corbell and his policy team for making sure that the ACT took that iterative step and improved the ACT legislation because this is a difficult area of policy and one that does need to provide a fine balance.
I will be supporting the amendments proposed by the government today as they do improve the bill in important ways. In particular, they place further reasonable limits on crowd control and search powers. I think in the current environment, where unfortunately there is a large amount of fear, there is always the potential for inappropriate use of these powers and for potential discrimination.
There are two other issues I would like to raise which I think still do need to be addressed and which I will be keeping an eye on if this legislation comes into force. It is relevant to mention them here as I have not had the opportunity to propose relevant amendments. Unfortunately we did not see the amendments until after 5.30 on Tuesday which did mean, with the 24-hour rule, there was a limited time to canvass the proposed amendments and whether there were any gaps remaining.
I will touch quickly on two issues. The first is that the legislation does not allow a person a defence of a reasonable excuse to refuse a search. To me it does make sense that this should be allowed. After all, the excuse has to be reasonable. It could, for example, be that the person has a medical condition which provides a reason.
The second issue is that I agree with the scrutiny of bills committee that there should be some amendment to the provision that gives authorised people the power to refuse entry to people on the basis that they are likely to commit an offence under the act or another ACT law. As the scrutiny committee said about a similar power in the Olympic Events Security Bill 1999, when taken in conjunction with the range of offences that could be created by the act this is a very broad and draconian power. It offends the general notion that a person may be penalised by reason of what they do and not simply by reason that it is suspected that they might do something.
The provision in the Major Events Bill is even broader than the one in the Olympic Events Security Bill as it extends to an offence against another law applying in the ACT. In these circumstances I recommend removing the part of the bill which allows authorised people the power to refuse entry to people on the basis they are likely to commit an offence under the act or another ACT law. This can be achieved by removing the words “or is likely to commit” in subsection 20A of the bill. I accept that there is a purpose to the power and that is to prevent the commission of offences inside the venue. However I believe the power is framed too broadly.
I would like to then just briefly remark on a few of the amendments that have been proposed. I agree with government amendments 1 and 3 as they provide further grounds on which the executive must be satisfied in order to declare or vary a declaration for any major event. This responds to an issue raised in the scrutiny committee that the state of satisfaction of the executive to declare a major event to be
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