BILLS › Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2011
Senator CHRIS EVANS (Western Australia—Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills, Science and Research and Leader of the Government in the Senate) (01:18): There are a couple of responses to that. First of all, as I understand it, the existing legislation providing for lower penalties than the Northern Territory penalties actually had the effect of overriding the Northern Territory penalties; it undermined their regime by providing an overriding provision which had a lower penalty. So that is clearly not administratively very good and sends the wrong signal. So the idea was to bring those in line with the Northern Territory penalty regime. I understand it was specifically requested by the Northern Territory Police as part of their measures to deal with grog running. Question negatived.