2016-08-16
Ms PENNICUIK (Southern Metropolitan) — I am pleased to speak on the Corrections Amendment (No body, no parole) Bill 2016 that has been put forward by the opposition shadow Minister for Corrections, Mr O'Donohue, on behalf of the coalition. With respect to the things that I would like to say about this bill, I would say that the name of the bill I think is provocative. I say that in the context of many other bills that are brought into this place with slogans in brackets rather than just a straight-out name as to what the bill is about. I think that is unfortunate in terms of this bill and in terms of many others that we see coming here. I have made this comment at other times about bills that have come before the Parliament either as private members bills or government bills as well. I think that is a practice that probably should be disallowed and that bills should be just named in a straightforward manner, without putting emotional or other aspects in brackets in the name of the bill.
This is a reasonably simple bill that makes additions to the Corrections Act 1986 with regard to particular conditions that the Adult Parole Board of Victoria should be able to consider. In fact, technically, with regard to the purposes of the bill, the bill would insert a new section 74AAA after section 74 of the Corrections Act. In a nutshell, the bill would make it mandatory that parole would be denied to a person convicted of murder or conspiracy to murder unless the board is satisfied that that prisoner has cooperated satisfactorily in the investigation of the offence to identify the location, or the last known location, of the remains of a victim of that offence.
I would like to say at the outset that Mr Dalidakis mentioned that the number of prisoners this would apply to is very small, and I mentioned this in a very brief discussion that I had with Mr O'Donohue about the bill earlier this morning — that it would apply to very few people. That is, of course, good. We would not want to see this applying to a great number of people. But we all know and have seen in the press the trauma and distress caused to families when the body of their loved one has not been found — sometimes many, many years after the offence has been committed — and the offender has been either unwilling or unable to provide that information.
The Greens acknowledge the considerable distress that those families continue to be in and acknowledge what the member said, that they are trying to assist families to reach closure with regard to these matters where a person has been murdered, a person has been convicted of that murder and the body has never been found. But I am not sure that this bill will actually achieve that aim, if that is the aim of the bill, because there are three fundamental problems and some ancillary problems with this legislation as it has been presented.
Firstly, it takes away the discretion of the parole board to consider this issue, which the parole board would always consider. I go back to the reforms that were put in by the previous government when the shadow Minister for Corrections was the Minister for Corrections and there were serious problems identified with the parole system. Certainly the Greens in this place — and I had many conversations with Mr O'Donohue about these issues — supported the reforms that were put in place largely as a result of the Callinan review of the operation of the adult parole board.
But one of the key things that Justice Callinan said was that there was an overload of work at the adult parole board; that there was not good information flow between the department, the police and the adult parole board so they did not always have the information before them; and that there was an under-resourcing of the staff of corrections and the secretariat staff of the adult parole board, leading to mistakes being made. There was also the issue that was raised by him and also by the Greens of the separation out of the consideration for parole of serious violent offenders from the rest of the vast bulk of offenders who were not classed as serious violent offenders and the need to separate those out and to give much more attention to the serious violent offenders.
As I understand it, these practices have now been remedied and that is happening. So the adult parole board, faced with one of these cases, would have before them all the information. They would know, for example, as Mr Dalidakis said, that the sentencing judge would have taken into account the very serious matter of the non-location of a body and that would have been an aggravating factor in the sentence applied to that person, so that person would have received a higher sentence because of that. So I think this is a matter that the adult parole board would already take into account.
I also put into context that in the reforms introduced by the previous government that we did support there was no automatic review by the adult parole board once a person became eligible for parole, which was a practice in the past. Now a person has to apply for parole. A person in this situation applying for parole, I would assume, would have some legal assistance and would be being advised that in applying to have that parole agreed to in circumstances where they were not cooperating it would go against them, in terms of the considerations of the adult parole board. I am basically saying I think this is unnecessary because I think the adult parole board would already take this into account.
I want to go to the second-reading speech on the bill by Mr O'Donohue, which I am surprised was so short, given the seriousness of the issue that we all agree we are looking at here. I was surprised that it did not go into any detail really as to providing the rationale for the provisions of the bill. Notwithstanding what might be in the explanatory memorandum, usually a second-reading speech will go to some more level of detail and explain not just, as an explanatory memorandum does, what a provision does but the rationale for the provision. So I am quite surprised at the shortness of the second-reading speech. I go to the third paragraph of that. It says:
… when it comes to parole and the justice system, as a community and as a Parliament we must always look for ways to better protect the community, hold criminals to account and put the interests of victims at the heart of the decision-making process.
I am very supportive of victims being part of the parole system, and they already are part of the parole system under the Corrections Act 1986. The adult parole board is already required, under sections of the act, to take into account victim impact statements and victim statements when it is considering a parole application. But I was surprised to read 'put victims at the heart of the decision-making process', because we spent a lot of time in the last Parliament discussing what should be at the heart of the decision-making process of the adult parole board, and we all decided and we all agreed strongly that the paramount consideration was the safety of the community. That is the paramount consideration; that is now enshrined in the legislation following all the problems that were identified by the Callinan review and other reviews and the lengthy deliberations of this Parliament on these issues. I was surprised to see that. As important as it is, it is not at the heart of the decision-making process for the adult parole board; what is, by agreement of everybody in this place, is community safety.
I will go back to one other of my three main concerns, which is whether this bill is going to actually achieve what the shadow minister is suggesting it will — and that is, that it will provide closure. Even if this provision was inserted into the Corrections Act, it would not mean that that information will ever be found out. A prisoner could continue to not provide the information. I will go to some of the points Mr Dalidakis made about why that might not happen.
It might be that the prisoner is incapable of providing or does not have the full capacity because of mental health or other issues to actually provide that information. There is also the potential subjectivity of the police. I do not want to cast aspersions on the police; I am sure they would do their best to find out that information. There is also the possibility that people in that position, a small number of offenders, may through their own mental health issues send the police on wild goose chases and further upset the families of the victims.
The other thing is that at the end of the day, whether or not the person gives that information, the person will be or could be released at the end of their sentence without having given that information and without in fact being on parole. That is not a desirable situation in terms of community safety. What we must always remember in all of the conversations we have had about parole over the last few years and keeping in mind the, in some cases, catastrophic mistakes that have been made in releasing people on parole, that the whole system of parole is there for a reason. That is that people, when they are found to be eligible and are not a community safety risk, are actually released on parole so they can be overseen, supervised and assisted to reintegrate into the community with the hope that they will not be a reoffender. We do not want a situation where people, in particular murderers or people who have committed serious violent offences, are not released on parole and are just released post-sentence with no supervision.
Of course a lot of this is covered by the serious sex offenders legislation where there is a process in place to deal with those people on detention or supervision orders. So a lot of this is covered off, but my point is that if the aim is to get information, I do not think this bill is going to get that information.
Another fundamental problem with the bill is the inclusion of the offence of conspiracy to murder. A person may have been convicted of conspiracy to murder and have absolutely no idea where a body may be located. They may have been involved in the conspiracy to murder or convicted of it without that knowledge as a result of any number of particular actions they may have taken which may have nothing to do with the actual commission of the offence or the location of the body.
Another issue is that a person may not cooperate because they are in fact innocent and have maintained their innocence for the whole time, notwithstanding that they have been convicted. There are plenty of examples of people who have been convicted of the offence of murder and were found later to have been innocent. In this case, with this provision in the legislation, they would be deemed to be uncooperative when in fact they have not actually committed the crime. Notwithstanding the importance of the issue that is raised by this bill, there are problems with the effects of the bill and also with the drafting of the provisions in the bill which we have concerns with.
I think this is a bill that could have perhaps gone to one of our committees to be examined but I do not see anything foreshadowing that, and given the small amount of information we are given to go on in terms of the second-reading speech et cetera with regard to the bill and the issues I have raised about the problems that result from it, I think that the concerns do stand.
As I said, in terms of the involvement of victims in the deliberations of the Adult Parole Board of Victoria, that is already allowed for under sections 74A and 74B of the Corrections Act 1986 which requires the board to consider any relevant victims submission they receive before making a parole order. So in terms of what the impact on the victims is, they already have that opportunity, and everybody in this Parliament agrees with them having that opportunity at the sentencing stage and at the stage of consideration by the adult parole board. These things already exist in the legislation.
Again, while I and the other Greens sympathise to the bottom of our hearts with the people who have to go through, as I said, sometimes many, many terrible years wondering where the body of their loved one is, I cannot agree that this bill will actually solve that problem. It has other aspects to it which we cannot support being inserted into the corrections act due to the reasons I have outlined.