Serious Fraud Office Amendment Bill

Yes. I’d like to address a couple of those things. So firstly, just want to acknowledge our director of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), Karen Chang, who, quite simply, is outstanding, and the entire SFO team. Yes, they have a lot of work on their plate, that’s no doubt about that, and they’re a relatively small agency, but they definitely know how to triage and prioritise. They are very good at that. Are they being absorbed or is there any changes to the SFO? Absolutely not. It’s important for us as a country. I think that your colleague made a very good speech earlier in the night about the fact that we have dropped behind a bit, in terms of corruption, and we want to reverse that; we are starting to reverse that. We are starting to head in the right direction and the SFO have played an important part of doing that in some of the pilots that they’ve rolled out over the course of the term of this Government.

So, yes, they are more than capable of being able to immediately adopt—in fact, they need this legislation because it’s made it very difficult for them to operate at the moment. So this is going to be a huge enabler for them.

Thank you, Madam Chair. My question’s around commencement as well. A lot of that makes perfect sense: if you’re going to execute a search warrant the day after it comes into force, you’ve got a new set of rules; that’s fine. My question, though, is about commencement of clause 8, section 22 of the Act amended. This is the legal search section, right? So if there was a search conducted yesterday, which was illegal under the current law, the evidence cannot be used and the guy gets off.

So my question—you can see where I’m going with this.

Yes—yeah.

💬 Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: So my question is about retrospectivity, because any person charged, the generic rule is you’re entitled to be charged with the offence as it was at the time it was committed. I don’t know what the rule is about the changing of what’s, essentially, arguably, a procedural rule, but also quite a substantive rule. I know that lawyers who are more detail oriented than me get really tied up whether the evidence is procedural or substantive. But it strikes me that it would be quite wrong for this legislation to validate a search and make evidence admissible. If it’s not admissible today, then it shouldn’t be admissible tomorrow. So I’d be interested to get your views on that.