The ACT Government and Opposition and Australian Federal Police have jumped in too hastily to support a proposal by a Canberra licensee for on-the-spot fines for people caught fighting, urinating in public, or drinking alcohol-free zones. The very jumbling of very different sorts of offences shows the proposal is not well though out. It should not be acceptable in a liberal democracy that police have the power to be prosecutor, jury and judge in criminal matters as serious as assault. These matters are properly dealt with by courts.
The trouble with on-the-spot-fines is that they in effect reverse the onus of proof. It is no safeguard to say that if a defendant chooses he or she can contest the matter; the defendant walks into court with a ticket which is tantamount to a presumption of guilt.
The support for the proposal gives credibility to civil-liberties suggestions going back two decades about on-the-spot fines and the random stopping of cars on the road would be the thin end of the wedge.
In our system the executive prosecutes, the judiciary judges and there is a presumption of innocence. Anything that erodes those principles should be treated with great caution. It is terrible, but perhaps necessary, that idiotic behaviour on the roads has cut civil liberties, but there it should end.