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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2012-02-28 Daily Xml
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SUMMARY OFFENCES (WEAPONS) AMENDMENT BILL

Final Stages

Consideration in committee of the Legislative Council's amendments.

(Continued from 16 February 2012.)

The Hon. J.R. RAU: Can I just say, Mr Chairman, that, if you and other members will allow me to do so, it would be useful, probably, for me to put a bit of context on the record at the beginning and, after that, that means I will not have to repeat the context in respect of each amendment.

The ACTING CHAIR (Hon. M.J. Wright): If you wish.

The Hon. J.R. RAU: I think the context is probably useful, otherwise we might get repetitive around each particular provision, and I do not think that is a good way for us to proceed.

First of all, the legislation was originally contemplated to deal with two problems. The first problem was quite a particular issue which related, as you might recall, sir, to a tragic incident where a young man was stabbed in the city some years ago, and he was stabbed by another person who, at the time, was a juvenile.

The circumstances of that event are, broadly, that the person who was the assailant had gone into a shop, and he purchased a knife. Apparently, as I understand the story, he then realised that the knife he had purchased perhaps was not adequate for purpose. He went back in—I am not sure whether it was a Crocodile Dundee sort of thing, but he said, 'This is not an adequate knife,' and he got a bigger one. Then he left and went out into the street—into Grenfell Street, I believe—and some sort of melee occurred and another young man was stabbed and died.

So, that was the first general area of concern when the preparation of this bill was being undertaken, and that is the access that minors have to knives. So, there is a more or less discrete part of the legislation that deals with minors having access to knives, and I think that, to some extent, that stands alone as a topic within the bill.

In addition to that, the balance of the bill is to do, really, with an array of different weapons. I think I should indicate to members that legislation evolves in the Attorney-General's Department by reference to topics or subject matter, and teams of people work on those topics and produce legislation. In some respects that is unfortunate, because you do not always appreciate the interlocking nature of one piece of legislation with another.

The situation we are dealing with presently is that we have two bills in the parliament which were introduced the other day in relation specifically to serious and organised crime. We have a number of other bills which were introduced in the last parliament and are at varying stages of passage through this place or the other place, and this is one of them. Those other pieces of legislation, when taken in conjunction with the two recently introduced pieces, form a whole which needs to be considered as a whole, not just by taking a bit out and looking at it all by itself and analysing it on its own terms.

The other pieces of legislation, aside from the two organised crime provisions, which were introduced last week and which I am not sure when we will be debating, but I notice the—

Ms Chapman: Tomorrow.

The Hon. J.R. RAU: Tomorrow? You are ready for tomorrow? Fine. That's good. Excellent. Those pieces of legislation were quite targeted. I am not going to waste a lot of time on these, because we are dealing with it tomorrow, but just to put on the record—

Ms Chapman: You are not allowed to.

The Hon. J.R. RAU: I am not going to debate them. I am just identifying what they are. One was what we call the SOCCA repair legislation and the other was the SOCA or the organised crime offences legislation. They are complemented first of all by the guilty pleas legislation that we put in a while ago, which sought in part to regulate the courts so that their time was fully occupied with cases which were going to actually run to trial, as opposed to those which were going to be pulled out of the list at the last minute by reason of a plea of guilty.

That legislation contained a number of things which were intended to change the culture of the legal profession and the courts, to move forward the point in time at which they give active consideration to whether a plea of guilty should be entered or not from the last minute, which is the situation now, to a much earlier time. The decision can be made earlier so that the trial list can have removed from it the cases that are not actually going to run, so that the ones that are in the list do get a judge and do run when they are supposed to run. The witnesses are not inconvenienced, the victims are not inconvenienced and so forth, and prosecutors and defence counsel get to focus on the work that is actually necessary as opposed to work that will never result in a trial.

Part of that legislation included, importantly, provisions which said that, if a person who cooperates with the police in a material fashion by giving information or giving evidence or whatever pleads guilty, they can get a much higher concession. The reason for that is we are trying to encourage people to talk. We are trying to put incentives in the system which say, 'You, as a criminal who knows about other people's criminal activities, it is in your interests to speak about it and help us prosecute other criminals.'

Likewise we put in legislation about declared drug traffickers, which was intended to take the incentive out of those people being involved in drug trafficking because of the serious penalties and consequences, namely a loss of their assets. Even then, that legislation has a provision in it which says that, even though you are convicted of one of these things, you can still get out from one of these forfeiture provisions if you cooperate with the authorities. That is a way to get out. So you have to be doubly stupid. You have to be a serious drug offender and you have to refuse to cooperate with the police before you get into the bad aspects of that legislation.

Then we had legislation regarding criminal intelligence. Criminal intelligence is important because these very serious criminal elements like nothing better than to be involved in licensed premises, gaming, firearms and the so-called security industry, bouncers in the common parlance.

What we sought to do was make the legislation in each of those areas secure from constitutional attack on the basis that it offended a constitutional principle, because we have one piece of criminal intelligence legislation in the Liquor Licensing Act which we know is okay because the High Court says it is okay. We simply wanted to replicate that in the other bits. I want to make it clear that all those form a package with this legislation. This is the last element of it that I want to mention.

What does this basically do? What it does, aside from the business about young people getting access to knives that I have already dealt with, is say that there are some people in the community who are such a menace that the police can at present apply under the Firearms Act 1977 to have a firearms prohibition notice put on them. We know from recent discussions here and elsewhere that 50-odd people out of the whole 1.5 million in South Australia have had that process undertaken in their case.

These are people the police think are such a risk to the community that the mere possession by these people of a firearm is of itself an offence and they can be searched in order to ascertain whether they have a firearm. It is a way of upping the ante. I am not going to name anybody because that would be foolish, but if you imagine a serious heavy criminal with a known criminal record for violence, if that person gets one of these orders on them it means that they cannot be out there with a firearm. I do not think anyone seriously thinks that is a big problem.

What we seek to do here is acknowledge that a person—that same person you would not give a firearm to in a fit—may nevertheless have other weapons like nunchakus, Samurai swords, machetes, knuckledusters, star knives, crossbows and a whole range of other things that you would not want that person to have. You would not want them to have those things. What we are trying to do here is broaden out the number of restrictions we can put on this limited number of people to have the right to carry what are basically offensive weapons. That is what it is about. It fits in with all the other aspects I have tried to briefly articulate about as to the measures designed to make it difficult for this very, very small number of very, very dangerous and ruthless criminal individuals.

I believe, although I am not sure, that this legislation has achieved a record of sorts in that it is the most amended legislation in living memory, if not parliamentary history. I am frankly puzzled as to why it has attracted quite so much attention because I do not think anything I have said about the objectives of the legislation should be confronting to people.

I know that underpinning some of the amendments here is what you might call a philosophical debate about regulations versus legislation. As I understand that debate, it goes something like this. My view was that because these characters are pretty nimble on their feet, and because what they are doing will change from day to day, week to week, month to month or year to year—and we know legislation is a reasonably slow-moving beast—to keep track of them legislation is okay in terms of the big picture, but in terms of detail it might have trouble catching up with them as quickly as we would like.

So we opted for a model which had a legislative framework but lots of scope for regulations to be made which would fill in the detail, and that would make the legislation reasonably nimble so that we could change regulations as and when the need required.

As we all know, the parliament has scrutiny of regulations and regulations cannot be made without being set aside in the event of the parliament not agreeing to them. So, the parliament still has scrutiny of regulations but the process is a much simpler, less cumbersome process than the passage of legislation. I guess, from that philosophical point of view, there are places in the original bill where we designed it in such a way that there would be the main architecture in the bill and the detail filled in by regulation.

I think, early on in the piece, we provided the member for Bragg with a copy not only of the bill but also early draft regulations. Can I say that, inasmuch as the debate is about where that tipping point is between regulation and legislation, we have the view that it is a more nimble arrangement in terms of law enforcement to have the regulations where we had originally put them than it would be to cast that in stone, so to speak, through legislative measures.

That said, if what the opposition wished to do is to have a discussion not so much about the balance between legislation and regulation but the content of the regulation and, more particularly, if the member for Bragg's concerns are that the regulations were not as detailed or perhaps not as sophisticated as she would have liked, then I have made it clear, and I make it clear now on the record, that we would be prepared to engage in a discussion about that, and it might well be we can resolve many issues about details of exactly what the regulations might say in particular instances. I guess I am making that offer to the honourable member and, through her, to the opposition.

If we do not get too hung up on this business about moving everything out of the regulations and into the act and we just work on the basis of, 'Let's, at least, talk about the original balance of those two things but, in so doing, recognise that there might be more work to be done on the detail of the regulations,' which we would be happy to do in discussion with the opposition, then I think that would be a sensible way forward, and I offer that as an attempt to break out of what appears, unfortunately, to be destined to be a deadlock. I just make that point.

That is really the big philosophical point of difference, I think, which results in so many of the amendments here. They are not only moving things from regulations into the act but they are also tweaking with the detail of those things as well in many instances. My concern actually is also that, because of the way in which these amendments have evolved in the upper house, there is a disconnect between amendment on top of amendment on top of amendment, which only reinforces my point, really, about legislation being the less preferable way of resolving those details: because, once we lock things into the legislative compartment, then the finetuning that might be required to make an amendment, say, by Mr Wade resonate with an amendment by Ms Bressington and resonate with an amendment by Family First, or whoever, becomes more difficult when they are in the legislation, as opposed to being left to regulation.

What I am worried about is that we will wind up with a piece of legislation which is internally contradictory, has no clear theme or message to it, and which becomes in practical terms useless to the police. I think that would be the ultimate failure for us as a parliament—to deliver something to the police which was basically just a piece of paper they could throw on their desk and have a look at and put their coffee on. Just imagine this in a few years' time. I see this now: it is my crystal ball thing. If this were to pass as it is now, there would be coffee rings all over it in some policeman's office, because I doubt it would ever be used, and it would not be responsive to the times, either.

That is really the big philosophical issue which underpins a lot of these amendments. I am happy to descend into the particular if that would be of assistance, because, let's face it, there is quite a bit of the particular to descend into. In fact, you could be listening to this for sometime as we descend into the particular.

Ms Chapman interjecting:

The Hon. J.R. RAU: Well, I have tried to give the overview.

Ms Chapman interjecting:

The Hon. J.R. RAU: Yes. Do you want to do an overview now?

The ACTING CHAIR (Hon. M.J. Wright): The member for Bragg has three questions (and for that matter any other member), and she can speak for up to 15 minutes. I am prepared to give her some latitude because, obviously, I gave the minister some latitude.

Ms CHAPMAN: Can I perhaps just indicate that, in due course, I think that the Attorney will want to put a specific position of the government on the record on amendment No. 1 (the criminal intelligence definition). I think that, with some informal discussion with the Attorney, we have agreed—if it is agreeable to you, sir—that I will address in general, as he has. He may then wish to make some brief comment about amendment No. 1, the criminal intelligence definition, and then I will attempt to do that briefly in response. I agree with the Attorney that we will be able to deal with a number of these amendments, I think, in groups because they relate to five or six general aspects. I am sure that we will both try to assist you to get through in that manner.

I will say first that it comes as no surprise to the opposition that the government has rejected these amendments, not because it regularly does so. From time to time it does accept amendments from another place and wise consideration of how it might assist in the ultimate application of legislation. However, the reality is that, notwithstanding the Attorney's indication that this is a bill within a suite of bills to deal with serious and organised crime in South Australia, nothing actually could be further from the truth.

The government, in fact, introduced this legislation post some events in 2008 (and I will address those shortly), but it is the government—although the Attorney on its behalf is suggesting today the importance of this being part of, as I say, a suite of legislation to deal with a very important social issue—in reality that has literally been sitting on its hands on this legislation. Let me just briefly recap.

This bill was originally introduced on 15 September 2010, and, for the benefit of the record, I advise that it was introduced by this Attorney not his predecessor, and I have often made some adverse comment about what contribution he has made in legislation, which this Attorney has had to pick up the end of. However, in this instance, it is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the current Attorney-General entity. It was introduced on 15 September 2010 and promptly passed with the support of the second reading of the opposition on 11 November 2010. It was considered in the Legislative Council in early 2011, which completed the committee stage on 21 June 2011. That is nine months ago.

The government proceeded to let it lie dormant for another six months until it finally brought it to the third reading vote on 8 November 2011. It then returned to this place where it sat until the prorogation. The government has suddenly renewed its interest in the legislation in the midst of a storm of violent outbreaks over the post-Christmas period, which are well known to all members in this place and which the opposition would suggest have grown in this state as a result of the failure to deal with organised and serious crime.

The government is now trying to somewhat opportunistically claim that this recent violence—and we have seen it all over the newspapers, one dead young man and his father riddled with bullets—somehow justifies the provisions contained in the bill. The government has also made a dismal attempt at rewriting history to present this as the measure for fighting organised crime rather than addressing street crime.

Let me remind the house of this: the genesis of this legislation lies in the tragic and fatal stabbing of Daniel Awak in the Grenfell Street brawl that occurred back in 2008. Members who were here then will remember that the then attorney-general instigated a review in respect of knife laws generally and outlined the concern arising out of the death of this young man. Alongside that, another 14-year-old boy was prosecuted, convicted of murder, given a nonparole period, I think, of six years, and there were questions of appeal—in any event, a long, sad story—and that was running alongside the development of legislation out of this tragic incident.

I think it is fair to say that that incident, having gone through its legal process, has no connection whatsoever to organised crime. In fact, for those who follow these matters, when they look at the government's contribution on the debate of this legislation—back on 15 September 2010 in particular—when the attorney-general presented a second reading contribution outlining the basis of this legislation, there was not one word by the attorney-general or any other speakers that raised the issue of organised crime in that debate—not one word. In fact, the very specific purposes outlined in the contribution by the attorney at that stage, included:

The bill fulfils the government's election commitment to introduce laws to prohibit the sales of knives of minors, authorise police to use hand-held metal detectors to find knives and other weapons, authorise the issue of weapon prohibition orders, and allow general weapons amnesties to be conducted in relation to dangerous articles and offensive and prohibited weapons.

To be fair, post the 2008 incident, post the review on 2009, we had the election in March 2010, and the then premier launched his policy on law and order, including serious crime. In the published document about what he was going to do to deal with serious and organised crime, there was not one mention about the weapons prohibition orders. However, there was a reference to that aspect of this bill in a second document on community safety, titled 'Safer Streets—Community Safety'.

In that policy document is outlined the government's intention, if re-elected, to introduce weapon prohibition orders to make our streets safer for those in them. There was not one mention of serious and organised crime. Quite clearly, even up until the election, preceding this legislation, the previous attorney-general and the premier had not linked this legislation with serious and organised crime. So, to come into this house today and try to present to us that this is a package to deal with a serious problem in the community—namely, serious and organised crime—is quite fallacious and we reject it entirely.

I also note that this legislation, when introduced, predated 1½ years the serious and organised crime legislation that was introduced, which ultimately ended up in the High Court and which, hopefully, we will be remedying in some way in the legislation we are about to deal with after we deal with this legislation. This bill fools no-one as being a part of that anti-serious crime legislation.

Quite clearly, the knife crime under Labor has been rampant—and I am going to refer to some statistics in a moment—during the lifetime of this government. So, it is not as though because it was bill that, in fact, had no genesis in serious and crime debates it didn't mean that it wasn't a serious issue to be dealt with, and the fact that we had a culmination of a street fight in Grenfell Street in which a 14 year old boy murders another child was serious enough.

So, safety in our streets is an important issue, particularly as, between 2000 and 2009, there were 10,448 victim reported offences involving a knife or machete. In latter years, knife crime has become even worse. In the year 2000 there were 1,043 reports; in 2009 there were 1,290. One of the main elements of this bill, emphasised by the government, has been the proposed restrictions on minors accessing knives. The incident I have referred to, tragic as it was, is clearly the basis for that.

Between 2000 and 2009 there were 1,414 charges against persons under the age of 18. That is a pretty sobering statistic. So, as zealous as the government have been to reduce the availability of knives through the bill, the government proposed to make it a criminal offence to sell a minor a knife, under any circumstance. The government's bill, however, was so broad that it captured even minors receiving a plastic knife and fork at a barbecue. No consideration has been given to the fact that it would criminalise one of the most basic community activities.

The Attorney-General has previously referred to this bill as the 'pig marketing bill' following amendments made in another place—something about the snout and the tail as being the only thing left, as I recall.

The Hon. J.R. Rau: No, that was not this one. That was—

Ms CHAPMAN: That was another one on confiscation of assets, but—

The Hon. J.R. Rau: This is a long pen; this one's like a stretch limo. It's got so much in the middle now, it's not funny.

Ms CHAPMAN: The Australian Labor Party might like to abolish the other place—I think that is still their policy. I remember we had lots of promises from the previous premier about getting rid of it, and all sorts of promises prior to the 2006 or 2010 election. They came up with some limp alternative about having a review, I think, ultimately. In any event, whilst they are obviously keen under their policy to get rid of the other place, the members there were elected by the voters and provide an important house of review, a chance to fix up the torrent of this government's mistakes and improve the legislation.

There were other ridiculous provisions such as those that required a person to visit every person at their residence, including neighbours in an apartment block, to ask if they had any weapons. Imagine the scene when a person, who has drawn the attention of police enough to have been given a weapons prohibition order, turns up at your doorstep asking you to declare if you have any weapons in accordance with the provisions of this bill. Is the person really meant to comply with the spirit of the section and say, 'Sure, sure, I've got a whole stash of them right here for you'? Absolutely absurd.

The legislation was defective, it clearly was not going to be effective, and it was going to place an absurd level of obligation which, in fact, would make it sit on any one's desk, let alone police officer's, with coffee stains all over it because it would be simply ineffectual, in its previous form.

The opposition, together with members in another place, took out a number of these provisions which would otherwise put the public at risk; yet such amendments are effectively treated with contempt by the Attorney-General, who thinks that any changes are simply either delay tactics or some kind of philosophical difference. These are very serious amendments, which I will refer to in very general terms shortly. We are not just talking about whether we prescribe the list of weapons that might be covered in some particular legislation.

The Attorney-General is quite right when he says that sometimes, when we have lists that tend to be exhaustive, we could miss something out, and it is appropriate to have a prescriptive power by the Attorney or some other minister to actually have the capacity to add to the list as more modern weapons become effective. But to simply have this prescription power to fill in what is otherwise a skeleton bill is not acceptable to us. We want the list there. If we miss something and it is too difficult to come back to the parliament, we can look at how quickly that can be dealt with.

When it comes to prescriptive lists of weapons, for example, where are we going to fit scissors, screwdrivers and all the other things that can clearly kill people? Pens. We have all heard the Amanda Vanstone answer to the federal initiative in, I think, the 2010 election—it might even have been before that—when she said how ridiculous it is when all she had to do was get on a flight. Of course, if she got on a plane, she would get real cutlery, because first class always has real cutlery. If you are in the back blocks, you get plastic cutlery. As Amanda Vanstone said, 'taking a knife away from me is not going to stop me if I am so possessed to stab the person sitting in the seat next to me. I just have to pull out my fountain pen or my ballpoint and stab them in the neck'.

So, the reality is that we have deficiencies in being able to deal realistically with the question of protecting everybody—minors and vulnerable people in particular—from those who might want to cause them injury by what we generally know as weapons that have no other domestic use.

Let us get real here. People can be stabbed with all sorts of things. In fact, subsequent to the legislation being introduced, there was one case out at Tea Tree Plaza that was covered in the local media, where a young man was stabbed. The prosecution evidence was that the four defendants who were charged at the time—and this is back in November 2010, around the time we were debating this in the first instance—may have stabbed the victim with a pen and not a knife. Presumably, during the course of the case, they were able to identify what the weapon ultimately was.

In that case, for example, the stabbing weapon—which was believed to be a pen—caused serious injury to the victim, who was also beaten up. However, the reality is that being prescriptive on a number of weapons does not protect the world—particularly in domestic circumstances, let alone in street circumstances—against being stabbed by something that will cause an injury or a fatality.

As to any question of the opposition being responsible in any way for the delay of the passage of this bill, I just want to place clearly on the record that this bill passed within months when it was debated in late 2010. In fact, it passed this place in less than a month and, when it got to the other place, it was dealt with within several months, even with all the amendments. Before the government even came back to pass the third reading, it took another six months, and it has been another nine months before it has been brought back on for debate here. So, I do not accept that for one moment; nor should this house, nor should anyone out there who listens to this debate or peruses it at a later time be in any way under any illusion that the delaying, in this instance, is the responsibility of anyone but the Attorney-General.

In summary, the amendments proposed in the other place and moved by the opposition included making it an offence to take offensive weapons into schools. We think that is pretty important. We still think it is important and we are puzzled as to why the government would not accept such an important addition to the effectiveness of the legislation.

The Hon. J.R. Rau interjecting:

Ms CHAPMAN: No, I am just making my general comments. Other amendments included ensuring that community barbecues are not inadvertently criminalising volunteers every time they give plastic knives and forks to minors.

The Hon. J.R. Rau: We can exempt that in the regulations.

Ms CHAPMAN: The Attorney calls out what he is promising to do in the regulations but let us just have it here in the legislation. Other amendments included introducing medical reporting provisions so that police have the information to target crime hotspots, amending provisions to ensure that searches are legally robust and do not put those assisting police at risk of litigation and people being searched at risk of abuse, and correcting the drafting problems that would have meant that police would be committing an offence each time they enforced weapons prohibition orders, if they did so carrying their standard equipment.

That has been very important for the opposition. We did not want police to be placed in a position where they would be liable to prosecution or exposed to potential prosecution when they were carrying out their normal duties with their usual equipment. As we know, police officers carry weapons for the purposes of guaranteeing their duty, whether they are batons, spray or the like, and they need to in order to properly carry out their role.

Instead, the government, having rejected the amendments in the other place, as we experienced with the prescribed drug offender bill, would rather reintroduce the legislation to repeat the same debate without any consideration of the views expressed in the other place during the previous debate. This is clearly a product of the government's failure to negotiate.

Whilst I hear today the Attorney-General extending an olive leaf for the purposes of a productive discussion on what we put in the regulations, that is really not good enough, Attorney. We will be having some discussions, I have no doubt, and they will be in a deadlock conference but, nevertheless, they will be about the act. Be under no illusion, we want minors and vulnerable people protected in streets and their homes and elsewhere. We will see whether this is cranked up to be useful in serious crime, but it has to be done properly so that it is effective and we protect our police.

We confirm that the government should accept the amendments to the bill and bring these laws in to address the crime that the bill was intended to address and that the amendments of the other place enhance the bill's ability to address crime involving knives and prohibited weapons. I say government members only have themselves to blame for the delay to crime laws. They are the ones who let it sit unattended for six months. They are the ones who failed to consult, who failed to see the unintended consequences the bill would cause and, worse still, failed to recognise the faults that have been appropriately highlighted in the other place.

Let us be clear. In putting the motion that this house reject the amendments of the Legislative Council without any non-government amendment, the government is continuing its position of disengagement—a loudhailer at 20 paces. If the government is serious about getting good law on the books as soon as possible, it will stop grandstanding and start negotiating on the act or sensibly accept some of these amendments.

The Hon. J.R. RAU: As always, I feel myself chastised after a contribution from the honourable member. If I can just summon a few words in my own defence, the original bill went for 19 pages. The new version that has come back to us, freshly minted from another place, runs to 45 pages. I have a version here with track changes on it, and I am looking at it and I am struggling to find any bits of the original bill left in it.

As I have said, there is a philosophical thing here about moving things out of regulations and so on that I am happy to have a conversation about. However, there are some points of fundamental disagreement and, more particularly, can I say, and I put this on the record, there have been many layers of amendment in the other place—we have amendment No. 30, which, I am advised, because it takes out certain provisions and then inserts a new one which is different, creates unintended consequences, and I will go into that in some detail at another point In particular, I draw the committee's attention to Nos 30, 46 and 53. These are ones where, it seems to me, we have got ourselves in a bit of a pickle by layer upon layer of amendment where the original purpose of the original thing is lost because it is removed and then other bits are put in. In fact, we have amendments on amendments, which cause some complexity.

It would be my suggestion, through you, sir, that the sensible way for us to proceed with this matter would be for us to proceed to a deadlock conference because the intricacies involved in going through all of this are such that they are going to occupy this parliament for a very long time. There is no reason why a committee of the parliament cannot go off and try to come to some sensible point of agreement on it where we can.

Can I say to the honourable member that it is not my view that every single proposition that was advanced in the upper house is silly; it is not my view that everything they have said or done should be dismissed out of hand. It is my view that the extent of the amendment to the original bill—that is, taking it from 16 to 45 pages—necessarily means that we have a fundamentally different beast from the one we had before and that we need to actually talk through what the detail of that will mean. I am happy to enter, in good faith, into discussions with the honourable member, and I guess we are obligated to have people from another place in the room as well, to try to see whether we cannot come to some point of consensus at least on a number of things. I think that would be good. I would very much like to have the legislation passed in a functional form.

As for the amount of time that this has taken, quite frankly, the sheer volume of amendments, and the layering effect of these amendments, has been something that has taken a bit of time to work through and to come to views about. Nevertheless, all of that said, it would be my suggestion, sir, that the most productive way of this matter proceeding further would be for us to recognise that the degree of detail is something that a committee of the parliament should look at rather than our laboriously going through each provision in here. I am not quite sure how I can make that suggestion in an orderly fashion.

The ACTING CHAIR (Hon. M.J. Wright): Attorney, what I would suggest, if that is what you want to occur, is that you move that all amendments be disagreed to.

The Hon. J.R. RAU: Thank you, Mr Acting Chairman. With those words, and on the understanding that the member for Bragg at least comprehends that I am not moving that they all be disagreed to because there is no room for us to have a conversation about any of them, I move:

That the Legislative Council's amendments be disagreed to.

Ms CHAPMAN: I agree with the course of action outlined by the Attorney. I notice, though, in his contribution he indicated that amendments 30, 46 and 53 which, on my understanding, relate to the imposition of a duty on orders to notify police, the incorporation and annual reporting for search area declarations and annual reporting on searches and discoveries respectively, are all matters which in some way are unworkable and have ended up being in some way legislatively corrupted by the debate and amendment process in another place. If that is the case, and there may be some legal aspect of that, then I invite him to forward to the opposition the particulars of that after the adjournment of this bill into deadlock conference, and we will have a look at that. If there is some result that was unintended by the other place as to the effectiveness of those, then we will obviously have a look at that.

The Hon. J.R. RAU: Can I just say that there are two elements there. One is the unintended consequence thing, which I think we can deal with. I will ask departmental officers to be able to brief the honourable member; that is probably the best way to deal with that issue. Whether we agree as a matter of policy in the end if that is sorted out, is a matter for me to deal with in deadlock.

Motion carried.


At 17:57 the house adjourned until Wednesday 29 February 2012 at 11:00.


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