Page 4224 - Week 13 - Thursday, 27 November 2014
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available without offering an alternative. Removing a sentencing option without providing an alternative simply limits the amount of discretion available to the ACT judiciary when considering sentencing options.
The ACT Bar Association raised a number of concerns with me relating to this bill. They said:
It ought to firstly be noted that the decision to repeal periodic detention was made without any consultation with the ACT Bar Association, or, as far as I am aware, with the broader community.
They go on to say:
Periodic detention, as a sentencing option, can only be imposed where a person is sentenced to imprisonment. It has acted as a sensible means of rendering full time custody as the option of last resort. In a time where the prison population in the Territory has rapidly increased—
and they note the submission they made to the Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety—
… without a corresponding increase in the crime rate to justify such an outcome, and without any legislative change to the sentencing regime, it is troubling that an option that has been used to minimise incarceration has been removed in this manner.
The issues that the Bar Association raises are valid. Firstly, one would imagine that the legal community would have been consulted about significant changes to sentencing laws in the ACT. Secondly, removing periodic detention without an alternative will be likely to place additional pressure on an already struggling prison system.
The third point which the Bar Association touches on is the fact that the ACT Assembly is currently conducting an inquiry into sentencing in the ACT. As we have seen already in this term of the Assembly, the government is happy to pre-empt the findings of a standing committee by introducing legislation wholly relevant to the area of inquiry before the committee is given the opportunity to publish its findings. This practice significantly undermines the committee structure in the Assembly and potentially renders irrelevant some of the research and evidence that the committee has gathered.
I will shortly move that this bill be referred to the standing committee and be incorporated into their inquiry into sentencing. But before I do so, I would like to make a few further points about the missing alternative sentencing option.
As directory officials reinforced with me yesterday during a briefing on this bill, the fact that the ACT is a small jurisdiction means we have “less capacity to get it wrong”. I question the order of how these changes are being made and introduced. If we have little capacity to get the mix of sentencing wrong, surely the conservative approach would be to introduce an alternative sentencing option in parallel to the existing range
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