Page 796 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 20 March 2019
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sporting teams or clubs or engaging in society in other ways that may actually be rehabilitative.
The breadth of anti-consorting laws is of significant concern as it means that the main constraint on their application is the exercise of discretion by police. The New South Wales Ombudsman found anti-consorting laws were used in relation to a broad range of offending, including minor and nuisance offending.
As noted by the Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety in its scrutiny report released by Mrs Jones on 12 March—just a couple of days ago—Mr Hanson’s bill prohibits a person from consorting with a person convicted of an indictable offence irrespective of whether the offence has any connection to organised criminal activity or whether it is related to intimidating, harassing or violent conduct. There is also no limit on how long ago the offence may have been committed.
Back to the New South Wales circumstances, unfortunately the Ombudsman found an exceptionally high police error rate particularly in relation to the laws being used against children and young people. The Ombudsman’s report further found that consorting warnings were given that breached the privacy of convicted offenders by disclosing their convictions to others. It said that most of the official warnings that police issued about consorting with a person aged 17 or less were actually unlawful.
It said that mostly the laws were not used to address issues connected to serious and organised crime. For me, that is the guts of it. For me these are laws that have great media headlines but do not do the job they claim to do. That is the very core of why we cannot support them in this place.
The New South Wales Ombudsman made a number of recommendations regarding the New South Wales anti-consorting laws to increase the fairness of these laws and to mitigate unintended consequences of their operation. Unfortunately, only some of these were implemented by the New South Wales government.
The New South Wales Ombudsman considered that absent these changes being made it was likely that the New South Wales consorting laws will continue to be used to address policing issues not connected to serious and organised crime and criminal gangs and in a manner that may impact unfairly on disadvantaged and vulnerable people in our community.
These comments are equally applicable to Mr Hanson’s bill as it has failed to take into account the legitimate concerns of the New South Wales Ombudsman in relation to anti-consorting laws. The Greens are concerned that Mr Hanson’s bill does not have sufficient legislative safeguards to prevent these powers from being misused.
The bill gives police a broadly unfettered discretion which we have seen misused in New South Wales with respect to vulnerable groups, and I have seen no evidence that the operation of anti-consorting laws in the ACT would be different from New South Wales. It is disappointing that Mr Hanson has not taken on board the findings of the New South Wales Ombudsman, the Legislative Assembly’s own scrutiny committee, and the ACT Human Rights Commission.
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