Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Oh Madam Speaker. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): I call Golriz Ghahraman. GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: Sorry it felt like the Hon Mark Mitchell was taking a second call—God forbid! Sorry Madam Speaker. It isn't a pleasure to rise to speak to this bill actually; it's a bit of a disappointment as the Greens speaker and former member of the criminal bar. This is a bill that everybody who has spoken so far has commended as if it's going to do something meaningful in the criminal justice system by way of somehow disincentivising crime. It is in fact a bill that does a lot of what the previous National Government did around lowering due process standards lacking focus on actual criminal activity and certainly ignoring all the evidence of what in fact causes crime. In lots of ways it becomes more harmful the more you think about how we focus our energy and congratulate ourselves as a House of Representatives every time we bestow more and more and more powers upon the police force without focusing on what in fact it means to be tough on crime itself which is to say that we prevent it.This bill goes so far as to allow us as a Government as a society to remove property from people based on it's being tainted. It's so alarming to me as someone who's come through a justice system context where things normally have to be proved with evidence to say that we are talking about a standard as vague and amorphous as tainted property being removed and that property tainted by crime—not obtained as a direct result of a proven crime; just tainted—can be owned by someone who is an associate of one or more members of an organised criminal group. So what does associate" mean? We've heard that apparently there are boundaries around that in section 5. What does "tainted" mean? Don't know—we'll have to litigate that out somehow. Who is going to be litigating that? People on legal aid apparently are just going to rely on a broken legal aid system to fight back against who the police happen to see as being an associate of a criminal group and whose property is tainted by crime. So we're very very far here in this bill from talking about actual crime or criminals if that's a term that we want to use in terms of who we are disincentivising and what kind of activities we're sanctioning—very far. We're also very far from the usual standards of criminal justice proceedings which say that the standard of proof is beyond reasonable doubt and that the onus of proof remains on the Crown from the beginning of the proceedings until the end. The standard of proof here is balance of probabilities. So it's not asking was there actual criminal activity was there an actual association and was there property that was obtained as a result of that criminal activity but is it probably the case and of course then we come to the onus which is reversed. So there is a presumption that your property was tainted and that you are an associate of a criminal group—probably—and if you want to reverse that probable assumption you have to prove it. So this bill isn't actually talking about criminals or crime or keeping communities safe. It's not about disincentivising violent crime at all. It seems to be a lot about either revenue gathering by way of taking people's property or what seems to be more the way that we're going in this House unfortunately—on both sides of this House—about making politicians look tough on crime. It's making us look like we're doing something about crime. What's kind of heartbreaking about the fact that we've chosen to lower the standards reverse the onus and use amorphous and unclear words is that we actually have a lot of hard evidence and data about what in fact causes crime. If we say that criminal offending has gone up this year or in whatever period we're using and if we're saying violence is an actual issue that we need to address—well great! We've got the evidence of what causes our communities to become unsafe and what causes violence—we know that. Unfortunately instead of it becoming a revenue-gathering exercise or something that lends itself well to knee-jerk simplified responses like this bill it requires us to invest resource and it's weird because—actually I did hear Paul Goldsmith very briefly refer to this—we can look at what's happened over the past year. We have a cost of living crisis. We have poverty and inequality on the rise at record levels. We have a mental health crisis. We might have a truancy crisis if anyone could agree on the stats. But what we know in the criminal justice sector based on all the research is that when young people come into the custody of police and then are sentenced to detention 89 percent of those young people—that's under-19-year-olds—are then diagnosed with a serious learning disability. So investing in inclusive education is a criminal justice response.We have mental health and addiction treatment we have inclusive education we have housing and incomes—all as categories of criminal justice responses that we know that the data shows would help keep our communities safe. Instead of talking about tainted associate property that maybe comes from some crime that we haven't proved or can't even name we could actually look at the evidence and listen to the experts and listen to the people on the ground. So unfortunately this isn't a good bill. Unfortunately it's just in line with an old pattern of politicians doing what makes us look slightly tough or good and I am disappointed that this Government has gone that way. We have the solutions and next term with a bigger Green heart in Government we'll get to those. I don't commend the bill to the House."