Clendon David: Policing (Storage of Youth Identifying Particulars) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Clendon David: Policing (Storage of Youth Identifying Particulars) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 16 August 2011. Volume:675;Page:20900. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DAVID CLENDON (Green) 
: 
 Before the lunch break I was making some points about the purpose of Part 1 and I wish to continue briefly on that same line. The point has been made a number of times that there is no evidence from 2008 that the idea of amending what was then the practice was intended to be shifted—that the change the police identified some 8 months ago was not intended—and that is fair comment. The point has already been made elsewhere as well that equally there is no evidence that there was no such intention and I will come back to that point in a moment.  
The general proposition agreed to is that identifying particulars should be retained in the event of a conviction and clearly that is the practice of the District Court and indeed of the Youth Court if a young person against whom a charge has been found proven is sent to the District Court for sentencing. I think we need to reflect for a while on why the Children Young Persons and Their Families Act specifically uses language other than the language of conviction. If we look at section 283 of that Act we see there is reference to conviction in some of the higher-order responses that are possible under that section. By that I mean some of the more serious responses in the event a young person has been found guilty of some criminal offending. It is proposed that certain forfeiture of property for example may be applied— 
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch) 
: I am sorry to interrupt the member. It is increasingly difficult to hear the member and I say to members if they want to have conversations then go out to the lobbies. 
DAVID CLENDON 
: Thank you Mr Chair. In the context of section 283 two or three references are made to penalties that might be applied to the young person as if the young person were an adult and had been convicted of that offence by a District Court. I think we need to reflect on that.  
As we said earlier the deal-breaker the point at which the 2008 legislation fell over and created this conundrum for the police and indeed for the House rests on the definition of the word “conviction”. I ask members who have been in this House for longer than I have why it was that when the legislation was being drafted there was specific exclusion that the notion of conviction to the largest extent possible was removed from the Youth Court. I think it is a reasonable proposition that a deliberate attempt has been made to remove the language of conviction—to take away that status of a convicted person shall we say—from young people. Rather the charge can be found and an order can be made against the person. I think we need to consider why that language is so specific and why such pains were taken to take away the notion of convicting a young person of an offence except at the very highest level and I refer to the purely indictable offences—the ones that conceivably carry something like a 10-year sentence.  
Clearly there is a difference between dealing with young people and dealing with adults. An arbitrary cut-off point of 17 or 18 years has been the point of distinction and we could contemplate that but I think for the moment it is sufficient to acknowledge that we treat young people differently. That is an aspect of our contemporary law. It was not evidenced in the Police Act 1958 to which some reference has already been made in this debate. I think we need to acknowledge that in 1958 no clear distinction was made in law between a person and a young person. I say that willing to be corrected but certainly on the very brief amount of research we have been able to do this morning we have been unable to find in the earlier legislation of some 50 or more years ago distinctions in law between a person and a young person. We have moved on from that and I think it is a good thing. Clearly we ought not to treat children or very young people as if they have the judgmental abilities—the abilities to distinguish what is sensible and a good action—of an adult just as we would not sensibly require them to meet the same standards as an adult.  
I think there are very sound reasons why we have changed this language. Fifty years on from 1958 we have acknowledged that young people are different. They are subject particularly in this modern era to very different pressures and expectations. They are growing up in a very different world from that of their peers in the 1950s and 1960s. I think we do need to seriously reflect on that when we consider this bill. Dare I say it with the legislation passed in 2008 which this bill seeks to amend perhaps we did the right thing by accident by excluding young children from the penalties imposed at the Youth Court and from this question of whether we retain their youth identifying particulars.  
It would be helpful I think if the Minister in the chair the Minister of Police took a call and responded to some of the very good questions posed by Labour speakers earlier in relation to the history of some of this and simply reflected on the matter of why we so carefully and deliberately avoid the notion of convicting young people. A conviction in the adult context enables police to retain the identifying particulars of an adult offender. By accident we now have a situation where young people do not have that same penalty imposed on them. I would be very interested to hear from the Minister and I hope she will take a call.