Page 543 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 19 February 2020
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I was pleased, before being a member of this Assembly, to lead the targeted assistance strategy panel in 2011 and 2012. It explained a broad range of ways of supporting people who run the risk of falling into financial disadvantage. The targeted assistance strategy was released in 2012 and, as one of the related reforms, the government subsequently enacted legislation providing flexible options for the payment of penalties under the road transport infringement notice scheme. These reforms were able to be implemented only with necessary IT system changes, leveraging the existing rego.act system, new staff resources to set up the infringement notice management plan office and liaison with a range of community based organisations to set up the community work and development option as an alternative way of satisfying an infringement notice penalty.
Legislation takes time, but implementation takes time and planning too. We know that road transport infringement notices for traffic and parking offences make up the vast majority of all infringement notices in the ACT and that the flexible payment options work well in relation to those. We agree that change is also needed to extend flexible payment options to other infringement notices issued in the ACT. This can be done effectively only after a thorough analysis of the implementation requirements to make sure that the policy intent of the bill can be delivered in practice.
The government therefore supports this bill, with the flagged amendment for the delayed commencement. We also note the minor and technical amendments that were circulated yesterday by Ms Le Couteur, based on representations from the community legal centre and Care Financial Counselling Services. We will be supporting those amendments when they are moved later in the debate. I commend the bill to the Assembly.
MR HANSON (Murrumbidgee) (5.35): The Canberra Liberals similarly will not be opposing this bill because, equally, we support the principle. But we do so in anticipation that we may need to revisit what is poorly constructed legislation. The principle of this bill of flexible processes for paying fines is one that all parties seem to support—and that is a good thing—but this bill is legally and administratively convoluted and clearly has not been fully thought out.
As the Attorney-General indicated, there will be an amendment moved by the Greens that delays the implementation of this bill by two years. The fact that the Greens are moving that amendment, I think, is clear acknowledgement that this is problematic legislation that is being debated today. There are also eight pages of other amendments that the Greens will be moving to their own bill in an attempt to fix up a number of other issues that have been raised with them.
When this topic was raised back in 2018 via a motion in this place, Mr Coe warned that there would be problems with this sort of legislation. He said:
The ability for this to be put out into practice is somewhat difficult … There would be many unintended consequences that would have to be worked through before any such scheme is rolled out.
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