Urgency

I move, That urgency be accorded the passing through all stages of the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Amendment Bill.

From time to time a situation emerges that requires an urgent fix by means of a law change, and this is exactly one of those cases. The bill that the House is about to consider, if it agrees to this urgency motion, makes amendments to the Child Sex Offender Register to ensure that the law properly reflects Parliament’s intention when the register was put in place.

The 2017 Act was amended under urgency so as to bring within the scope of the Act some registered persons who had been identified as not registerable under its retrospective provisions. However, in February this year, the Supreme Court excluded from registration provisions some of the individuals whose qualifying offence was committed before that Act came into force, but who were convicted after the Act came into force. It was always Parliament’s intention that those people would be covered. Parliament’s had two goes at ensuring that they should be covered. The decisions of the court contradict that, and therefore we are using urgency to fix something to make sure that Parliament’s original intent has been upheld.