Page 3188 - Week 10 - Thursday, 17 September 2015
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measures. The bill makes amendments to address issues raised by ACT Policing relating to the operation of the child sex register, the ACT experience of child sex offending issues and matters arising from national discussions about the best way to effectively monitor child sex offenders.
This includes the introduction of police powers of entry and search based on a specialised warrant application to verify personal details reported by a registrable child sex offender or their compliance with a prohibition order; the introduction of powers allowing police to request a registrable offender’s details relating to encrypted information; new offences punishable by five years imprisonment and/or 500 penalty units where an offender does not comply with entry and search warrant conditions; providing a power for the CPO to apply to a court for the registration of certain previous offenders; introducing a power for the CPO in limited circumstances to issue a public notice with the name, description and photograph of a registrable offender; and amending section 37 of the Crimes (Child Sex Offenders) Act 2005 where an offender must report annually to change the fault element for failing to report and allow reporting of changes in personal details rather than reporting of each individual personal detail.
There is a range of other provisions, amendments and changes throughout the legislation but, in essence, they are all aimed at tightening the operation of the child sex register and dealing with child sex offenders in the ACT. I will not go ad nauseam through the detail, but we certainly support the intention of these clauses. We support the bill in principle, but I note that there are numerous pages of comments from the scrutiny of bills committee. I have received from the government today, through the scrutiny of bills committee, the response to the scrutiny report. We only received that a short while ago.
My understanding is that the government will seek to adjourn consideration of the bill once we have agreement in principle and that next week we will debate the detail stage of the legislation. I have had a quick glance at the scrutiny comments and we will go through those in more detail. I will, if necessary, seek a briefing from the government, as we have on similar bills and complex legislation. We have worked with the Attorney-General’s office.
In supporting the bill in principle today, let me be very clear: we will support any measure that aims to protect children in our society and that makes appropriate changes to our laws and regulations to make sure that any child sex offenders who are subject to conditions applied upon them are managed in an appropriate way and there are no loopholes or gaps in our laws. We want to make sure that our police and others involved in this space have the appropriate powers and the backing of this place to complete the very difficult tasks that they have.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (12.12): I will talk briefly about the main elements of this bill, noting that we will only debate it in principle today. I understand the attorney has been looking at the scrutiny of bills committee’s comments, which are extensive, and we will need to debate the detail stage of this bill at a later time. The amendments proposed in this bill are intended to strengthen and modernise ACT laws relating to child sex offenders. In particular, they relate to the administration of the
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