Garrett David: Sentencing (Offender Levy) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Garrett David: Sentencing (Offender Levy) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
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DAVID GARRETT (ACT) 
: 
 I rise to speak on this first reading of the Sentencing (Offender Levy) Amendment Bill. This bill is one of a number agreed to by the ACT Party in our confidence and supply agreement with the National Government and for that reason we will be voting in favour of it today. 
I appreciate what the Government is trying to do. It understands that there has been a failure in recent times to address the interests of victims. Too often victims are subjected not only to emotional and physical scars but also to further harm through financial costs. Members will know that I have worked actively with the Sensible Sentencing Trust for 5 years or so but I am not going to do as Ms Ardern suggested members might and roll out a number of cases. I think that it is wrong to do that and everyone knows them anyway. 
Before moving on to the bill itself though I will pay tribute to the Labour Government which introduced the Victims’ Rights Bill because that was a significant step. When one goes to law school one of the things they teach that seems very strange to a lay person—or to a lay person like me—is that the victim has no status. A case is named for example “ 
The Queen v Brown 
” and Mr Smith or Ms Smith who was raped or killed is really an irrelevance—or was 20 years ago when I was at law school. So the Victims’ Rights Bill introduced by the Labour Government was a significant step in at least giving the victim a status in the criminal justice process and I commend the Labour Government for doing that. 
The problem with this bill I am afraid—and the finger has been put on it fairly well by speakers on the Labour side—lies in the simple problem of extracting the $50 levy. The amount clearly is not enough in itself but here is the catch-22—or one of the catch-22s for reasons that I will go into in a minute. Fifty dollars is nowhere near enough but even that will not be able to be extracted in many cases so it is pointless making it $150. 
In the old days judges would order a fine of X dollars or in default 14 days in prison. I personally would be very much in favour of returning to that system rather than having what we have now—huge levels of unpaid fines. But that would not help victims either. Fourteen days in prison if an offender did not pay a levy—so what? It does not help anyone as other speakers have said get to conferences or pay for losses that have been suffered. Mr Cosgrove over on the Opposition benches said that 80 percent of reparation is paid. When I saw that reported on television it sounded awfully high. Then I thought about it and of course the reason that 80 percent of reparation is paid but $780 million in fines is unpaid is that reparation often has a significant effect on a sentence. If the lawyer for the criminal stands up and says: “And reparation has been paid your Honour.” or says that $500 or $1000 has been paid to the Salvation Army that affects the sentence that is handed down. 
So I am not surprised that reparation is paid at a fairly high rate. But fines are effectively voluntary in this country now—except if an offender wants to travel overseas as Ms Ardern has said—and every day judges write off huge amounts of fines. If a young offender whose income is $25000 a year accumulates 30 grand in fines when the level of fines gets high enough the judge writes them off. It is an entirely unsatisfactory system. So I am afraid that I cannot see that collecting this levy will be particularly practical and that is leaving aside the administration issue which appears to be quite uncertain. But given that the levy has a different status from a reparation payment—it has a different status from a fine as well but it is more akin to a fine than a reparation payment—I cannot see why offenders would be particularly keen to pay it. We need to remember that by definition the people who will be subjected to the levy will be criminals many of whom will have their lifestyle subsidised by the State and/or have no legal income. So I do not know where or how the levy will be collected. We will see the kind of situation we have now where $10000 in fines is ordered to be paid at $1.25 a week then eventually is written off. 
However ACT still supports the bill because it is a step in the right direction as others have said. The problem with the levy and the payment thereof can be solved surely in other ways. This is not ACT policy but my personal view is that one way would be to divert speed camera fines to this fund. I personally have been subjected to a few of those. I would imagine most members of the House have and one feels unjustifiably embittered that Government coffers are being swelled by 50 bucks or 200 bucks or whatever it is. I personally would feel better if that speed camera fine was going to a victims’ fund. But that is my personal view; it is not ACT policy. That is one idea; there must be others. 
So we support the bill because it is a good idea. We support it because it recognises victims’ rights and victims’ need for compensation. Ms Ardern I think correctly said that the Pay or Stay campaign at the border has been effective as has seizing defaulters’ cars. So there are other ways. The level of the levy is clearly inadequate. When we think about the logic of it we realise that we pay insurance to cover the possibility that our house might be burned down for example. But only one in a thousand houses burn down; the premiums on the other 999 are invested in the Bahamas and reinsurance schemes pay the company’s profit and the cost of whoever’s house has burned down. But in this bill every criminal will have at least one victim and sometimes more than one. Every victim will have at least $50 in tangible costs but probably more like $500 in tangible costs. So the level is quite inadequate but as I said at the beginning of my speech there is no point in making it $200 if we cannot even collect $50. 
In conclusion ACT supports the bill in principle and because we are committed to doing so but there has to be a better way and hopefully that will emerge at the select committee or the very bright people out in the community will come up with a better way to fund the proposed scheme.