Page 3294 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 23 August 2017
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Coming into this place, Mr Rattenbury calls the shots, Ms Le Couteur falls into line and will vote against her own recommendations. That is what we saw this afternoon.
As a result, instead of those good recommendations from the committee’s report being implemented by the government, we got, as I described before, wishy-washy weasel words. That is what they were from this government. As I said to the Attorney-General, we will be holding him to account. If we see in annual reports or in budget estimates next year a failure to resource the DPP then we will continue to litigate this issue, and we will turn up the volume on it.
Another area of concern is that of bail in the ACT. We know that this is an area of considerable concern to the community. For a number of years we have been calling for a bail review. I will turn to the tripartisan committee of the Assembly, and I will quote from a couple of their recommendations:
In light of calls from the Prime Minister for nationwide review, the Committee recommends that the ACT Government undertake a full review of the operation of bail laws in the ACT, and update the Assembly by the last sitting day in 2017.
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government start collecting information and statistics on offences committed by those who were subject to either bail or parole orders.
The response from the government is poor. With respect to the recommendation that there be a review, the government has “noted” that. We know that there is a problem with the application of bail. We know that the Prime Minister and other jurisdictions are acting. The Prime Minister has called for that review. I think that was supported by Mr Shorten in the federal parliament, and this government is sitting on its hands. That is a disappointing approach to that issue.
In terms of information collection, this was an issue raised by Mrs Dunne when she was shadow attorney-general, quite some time ago. The government does not collect information about who is committing offences whilst on bail. We have asked the government to collect this information for, I would say, six or seven years, and they still cannot provide that information. They have said they are going to start collecting that information if they can. They only agreed in principle.
How are this government able to tell us on the one hand that they will not do a review because the bail laws are working okay but on the other hand say, “We don’t actually collect the information about what’s happening to people on bail, so we don’t know”? Again, we will continue to litigate this argument. I sincerely hope that when we come back to this place next year or in annual reports, the government is able to provide that important information, and start providing that to the community. When they do see that, we will then be able to have a much better view about whether bail laws are working properly. In my view, significant problems remain.
In conclusion, there was pretty good work done by the estimates committee, under the chairmanship of Mr Wall. I know that it was a tripartisan committee, and I commend the members of the committee for their approach. I think there were some very good
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