28 June 2019
This quarter the Law Council of Australia (LCA) meetings were hosted by the Northern Territory Law Society in Darwin.
At one of these meetings, a significant policy position was reached — that the minimum age for criminal responsibility should be 14 years, and the LCA would like that policy adopted by all jurisdictions. In the ACT, the Criminal Code 2002 states that “a child under 10 years old is not criminally responsible for an offence” (s 25), and that a child aged between 10 and 14 years “can only be criminally responsible if the child knows that his or her conduct is wrong” (s 26). It is a question of fact as to whether the child knows his or her conduct is wrong, and the burden of proving that knowledge is on the prosecution.Our submission to the Attorney-General in April 2018 argued for a minimum age of 12 years with an upper age of 16 years. Our Criminal Law Committee will be considering this very serious issue and providing advice to our Executive and to me. If you have any comments, you can email them to me at president@actlawsociety.asn.au.
Other subjects discussed included the proposed amendment of the Conduct Rules for Practitioners, which was deferred to a future meeting to enable more input by members. To this end, our Legal Profession Act and Ethics Committee will be providing comment.
Outside the meeting’s agenda there were two very notable presentations. One was by Olga Havnen, a prominent aboriginal leader, advocate, and activist in the Northern Territory. She is currently the CEO of the Danila Dilba Health Service in Darwin, an Aboriginal community controlled health service. Her talk was on the Diagrama Foundation, founded in Spain, which provides an innovative approach to juvenile detention, and is deserving of further close consideration in Australia. The second presentation was by the Chief Justice of the NT Supreme Court, the Hon Michael Grant CJ, who focussed on the deplorable number of indigenous people in detention, on the misinformation that is promulgated against the Uluru Statement From the Heart, and he reminded us that population statistics show the indigenous people in the Northern Territory are likely to achieve parity with the remainder in a few decades.
Aside from those serious matters, for me Darwin also has a few personal historic sites from my last visit there as a teenager on a working holiday. One site is the former camping area on Mindil Beach where I stayed for a few months. The other site is at the top of nearby Gilruth Avenue where, on my first day of work with the NT Roads, I was tasked with sweeping up a small triangle of gravel. It should have taken ten minutes, but my enthusiastic activity was stopped by Buckle, the “ganger” in charge, who told me very clearly that the job had to last 2-3 hours. Now I find the campsite has been built over by a casino, and the small triangle of gravel is a smooth part of a busy roundabout. How things change! But then, it was a few years ago…
Chris Donohue President, ACT Law Society