Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

As the minister has rightly noted, it would be only in extreme cases that we would reach the stage of intervention in relation to children. Would the minister not agree that there are almost, imaginably, no cases in which a person below the age of 18 would be able to feasibly meet a civil penalty of $107,000? In fact, the burden of meeting this penalty would fall upon the child's family or extended family. In that case, wouldn't it simply be better to follow the advice of the Australian Law Council, guided by the views of the United Nations and embodied within the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and put in place a comprehensive, diversionary, educated, evidence based approach to dealing with this very serious issue in relation to children?

I would also remind the minister at this point in time that these questions with regard to the action of civil penalty regimes on children and their possible impacts are something we could have explored had the government agreed to my suggestion to allow the Senate to perform its role as a house of review and refer this bill to committee. These are serious issues which relate to the community as a whole, with a massive impact on children, both as victims and as perpetrators. This is a complex legislative area and, while I appreciate that the minister is providing us with the opportunity to scrutinise the legislation in this period, it would have been so much easier to answer these questions and produce a piece of legislation as robust, comprehensive and durable as that which is deserved by the victims of this most heinous crime.