Penny Wright (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I am glad that the minister has referred to the legal aid implications of this—and I will come back to those questions. But that did not actually answer the question I had, which is: what evidence is there that the existence of the judicial discretion, which is what we are discussing here, has actually caused a jeopardisation of the outcome of unexplained wealth proceedings in the past? What I would like to do is be really clear and ask the government to get their story straight on the rationale behind this particular aspect of the legislation. We are told that one of the bases of unexplained wealth legislation is to take the profit gain out of organised crime. And certainly the Greens are supportive of the view that that is an effective thing to be doing. I was involved in the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement when it was first considering the first manifestation of this legislation—or the issue anyway—and one of the issues was that it is indeed quite effective to have criminals who have been used to having a lot of money to flash around, to drive flash cars and so on, to have that money not available to them. So I understand that rationale. But then we have the argument that we cannot allow judicial discretion in some cases to allow persons who are subject to these proceedings to use their restrained assets to get legal defence because they may dissipate the assets, which then would not be available to the government. But in that case, if the story is that it is in fact about separating criminals from their money, why is it such a problem if they are effectively removed from the benefit of the assets because they have had to use them on legal defence proceedings? Is that the issue, or is it in fact that the government is concerned that, if the money is being used on legal defence, it will not be available as revenue for the government? I am not clear on that. It is one or the other. But you cannot argue that the use of restrained assets for legal defence proceedings does not remove the money availability from the persons who are allegedly the criminals. In the end, if that is where the money is gone, they are not going to have that money available to live the high life, which is what we are wanting to prevent.