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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, First Session (53-1)
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Justice Reform

Mr GARDNER (Morialta) (14:25): A final supplementary on this line, sir: given that the CEO of Corrections in evidence to the Public Works Committee on 9 October identified that the spike in prisoner numbers is partly due to a 30 per cent increase in assault, 50 per cent of which are domestic violence related and also Parole Board warrants and bail breaches, can the minister reassure the house that his proposals to relax bail conditions will not make it easier for these categories of remand prisoners to walk free?

The Hon. J.R. RAU (Enfield—Deputy Premier, Attorney-General, Minister for Justice Reform, Minister for Planning, Minister for Housing and Urban Development, Minister for Industrial Relations) (14:26): Again, I thank the honourable member for his question; it is a very good question. I make it clear that in respect of bail he has used the word 'relax'. I do not want to let that word be passed by into Hansard and not be commented upon. I am not talking about relaxing bail conditions if what you mean to imply by that is say that a lot of people who should not be getting bail are getting bail; that is not what we mean. We are talking about refining the tests that are used to ascertain whether bail is appropriate in particular cases; that is a different proposition.

The second point is that the primary concern this government has—and we have demonstrated this time and time again in terms of legislative change—is with public safety and an analysis of the risk presented to the public by particular accused people. The member for Morialta in saying that in cases of domestic violence we do have particularly difficult circumstances where there may be a significant risk to particular individuals, although not necessarily to the whole community, is absolutely correct. Of course, we are not taking those matters lightly; they are very serious matters.

The point I was trying to make the other day is that there might be a person who is perhaps facing a custodial sentence because of repeated abuses of the Road Traffic Act—driving without a licence or unregistered and uninsured or whatever the case might be. I am not condoning that behaviour for a moment; I don't wish to say that. But I do raise the question—and it is one of the questions that we will be asking in the context of this overall review of the justice system—is custodial sentence in a prison institution the appropriate way to deal with that person having regard to the risk that that person presents to other members of the community if they were to be punished in a different way? That is the question. I do not purport to have the answer here for you at the moment, but that is the sort of question we are asking because we need to be a bit honest with ourselves here.

The prison system is a very intensive system from the point of view of the people who are in it. It is a resource intensive system, it occupies significant government resources, and it means that the people who are in prison for the time that they are in prison are denied whatever benefits—and I realise sometimes these are not great—they might have of living with friends and family and whatever benefits they might have of potentially being employed. Anybody will tell you that a person in employment who has decent connections with family and other people who will keep them on the right track is less likely to become a reoffender than somebody who does not have that position.

If, for example, we have people who are not dangerous and the alternative is there that that person might be able to be dealt with in a circumstance where they continue to go to work, albeit with a curfew or something, and they continue to live with their family and have some contact and responsibility, it is my view—and I think the data bears this out—that it is more likely than not that that person will produce a better outcome at the end than if you took that person and stuck them in Yatala for two years. That's what I am saying.

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