David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Crimes Amendment (Penalty Unit) Bill 2022 will increase the value of the Commonwealth penalty unit from $222 to $275, and that will take effect from 1 January next year. This is the way in which fines are meant to keep pace with inflation, without having to amend each and every bill.

We do not oppose the bill, but we would like to take this opportunity to talk about the urgent need to make the fine system and the way in which penalty units are applied far fairer. Fines are the most common summary penalty, but it's clear that fines don't have an equal impact as a punishment or deterrent and it depends on who is receiving them. For a person on jobseeker payments a single penalty unit imposed at $222, or now $275, is crippling, but the billionaires and multimillionaires in this country wouldn't even notice it.

Fines need to be in proportion to income to really be fair. A $275 fine means nothing to a banker or a property developer, but to a student, a person on the NDIS, a renter, someone on jobseeker that $275 means skipping meals. It means unpaid rent for the week. It means missing a wisdom tooth removal that you have already been waiting six months to afford. An action punishable by a fine too often just means it's legal for rich people. Fine enforcement, as it currently occurs, produces deeply unfair and often escalating hardships for vulnerable people who, not being able to pay a fine, may then go on to lose their driver's licence. Then they may be caught driving without a licence, lose their job and find themselves dragged into the criminal justice system.

We commend the work by the Law and Justice Foundation to the Senate. I want to give a particular call out to the work of Professor Julia Quilter and those others in that team who have worked on this important issue. An income based model is already in place in other jurisdictions, including Finland, where the method for calculating fines is based on the amount of spending money a person has for one day and then it's divided in half. It is based on their income.

I pushed the need for this in New South Wales and, thankfully, we managed to secure changes that ensured people on government benefits can receive a 50 per cent lesser fine than the fines issued to others. That's fair because it has a far bigger impact even at that lesser amount. We were told, however, that income based fines were impossible to do at a state level, because the states didn't have access to the taxation data necessary to determine income based fines. Well, that's clearly not an issue at the federal level. We call on the federal government to take steps to address the clear unfairness of fixed-level fines regardless of income. The law needs to be just and treat people equally. Equal treatment doesn't mean the same treatment. That's the fundamental flaw in how the Commonwealth uses fines and it's the flaw that this bill fails to fix.