The Intervention Orders (Prevention of Abuse) (Section 31 Offences) Amendment Bill 2024 (PDF, 257.3 KB) (Bill) will amend the Intervention Orders (Prevention of Abuse) Act 2009 (Act) to address an historical charging error in relation to offences under Section 31 of that Act.

It has been identified that multiple persons have been charged with and found guilty of an offence of breaching section 31(1) of the Act that did not involve a contravention of a term of an intervention order imposed under section 13 of that Act. In short, they should instead have been charged with and found guilty of the more serious offence of breaching section 31(2) of the Act.

Nearly all of these prosecutions were resolved by way of a guilty plea and the defendant was sentenced by the court on the basis of their admitted, uncontestedor proven conduct, as if the prosecution were for the more serious section 31(2) offence.

This error has not exposed those persons to a greater penalty than they would have been liable to had they been found guilty of the offence of breaching section 31(2) of the Act. Nonetheless, review proceedings may be available to those persons.

This Bill would enact a scheme to apply to any such review proceedings that may be permitted to be commenced out of time.

Specifically, the Bill will:

• Establish a process to allow a fresh prosecution for a section 31(2) offence, based on the same facts, to be brought out of time in any case where a defendant seeks to appeal or review their past section 31(1) conviction or sentence.
• Allow those fresh section 31(2) prosecution proceedings to be dealt with at the same time, by the same review court hearing an appeal or review of the past section 31(1) conviction or sentence.  If the fresh prosecution proceedings are contested by the defendant, the review court will be able to send the matter to a court of summary jurisdiction for trial.
• Make any agreed or undisputed facts received in the original sentencing proceedings for the offence against section 31(1) admissible as evidence for the purposes of the fresh section 31(2) prosecution proceedings.
• Provide for the off-setting of the previously imposed penalty (including costs and a levy imposed under the Victims of Crime Act 2001) against any sentence imposed in the fresh section 31(2) proceedings, including removing any liability to repay to the defendant any fine or compensation paid by the defendant.
• Permit a person’s relevant section 31(1) conviction to be taken into account for the purposes of a ‘second or subsequent contravention offence’ in subsection 31(2aa) of the Act.

The Bill also provides that no liability attaches to the Crown in respect of any proceedings against a person for an offence against section 31(1) of the Act where the person did not contravene a term of an intervention order imposed under section 13 of the Act, or relating to the imposition and enforcement of any sentence for such an offence.

Further information about this Bill, and its passage through the South Australian Parliament, is available on the Parliament SA website.