The New South Wales state election is coming up on March 24, and in an effort to gain popularity, opposition party leader Peter Debnam (Liberal party) has produced a shopping list of impractical ideas that are more at home in a pub than in a political forum.His latest plan is to make children as young as ten criminally responsible for crimes, and to reform the law in NSW so that 17-year-olds can be charged as adults.
At the moment if a child under the age of 14 commits a crime, the prosecution must prove that the child knew what they were doing was wrong. Under Debnam's plan, this age would be dropped to 12 for serious crimes and 10 for minor offences.
Perhaps he could also allow juvenile offenders to be named and have their photos published in the newspaper and on television. That would go down well with the cloth-cap intelligentsia.
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