Page 434 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 20 February 2018
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The Canberra Rape Crisis Centre fully supported the government’s grooming legislation. I thank Chrystina Stanford and the team at the CRCC for their invaluable assistance in helping to make the territory’s legislation stronger. These government amendments leave no doubt about the rights and the procedural fairness that will come with today’s bill.
Specifically, in relation to amendment 1, which is the first of two amendments to clause 4, this amendment inserts a new section 56(11A) to make absolutely clear that the provisions of new section 56 do not criminalise conduct that was not an offence at the time the act occurred. The bill as tabled was never intended by the government to criminalise acts that were not previously criminal at all.
MR HANSON (Murrumbidgee) (4.54): The opposition will support this amendment, but I will raise some significant concerns about the process that has led us here. Firstly, when Mr Ramsay sought leave to move his amendments, his explanation was that they are urgent. That goes to the reason why I sought that the debate be adjourned. They are not urgent. There is nothing urgent about this. We should not be doing this on the fly; we should be doing this deliberatively. We should not be in a position where we are doing late-notice amendments to try to fix up a bill which, if we get it wrong, has potentially serious consequences.
I will go to some of the other points that Mr Ramsay has made. He accused, I assume, those that did not support what he was saying—he gave examples, be they the Bar Association or me—of trivialising the sexual abuse of children. That is a pretty disgusting allegation to make. I do not think Mr Archer of the Bar Association or others are doing that. That is an inappropriate and wrong thing for Mr Ramsay to say. If he is looking to have a debate and consult with the bar, the Law Society or others, and work cooperatively with the opposition, I think it is vile to make a slur like that. I make it very clear that nobody that is engaged in this debate would seek to do that.
I condemn Mr Ramsay for making such an inappropriate comment. I am sure that Mr Archer and others would not be in any way happy that the Attorney-General made a comment like that. The bar has indeed raised legitimate and serious concerns about retrospectivity. Examples have been cited where the law, as it has been drafted, may lead to unintended consequences. It is not to say that anyone in this debate does not have a concern about this issue or support the intent of what it is trying to achieve. Certainly, I understand that people who have engaged in this debate, including those that Mr Ramsay talked about—the Rape Crisis Centre—are supportive. But the concerns raised by the Law Society and the Bar Association are about aspects of the law and the drafting of this bill—which, indeed, have been proven, I would hope, to be somewhat valid, in that Mr Ramsay has just moved an amendment to clarify his bill. By virtue of the fact that we are discussing this amendment, in many ways that validates the concerns raised by the Bar Association, the Law Society and the opposition.
I think that this amendment, to a large extent, puts the problem to bed, in that a crime that was not a crime pre 1984 and, to an extent, prior to the 2013 amendments that we had in this place, is not a crime. I think that is a good thing. But it is a difficult
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