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A prominent criminal lawyer has backed the ACT government's stance against anti-consorting laws, saying they would amount to "cherry-picking" some human rights and discarding others. Canberra Criminal Lawyers principal lawyer Paul Edmonds, who sits on the ACT Law Society's criminal law committee, said while uniform laws across Australia were "a worthy and lofty goal", consistently bad laws were not. Mr Edmonds' comments came after ACT chief police officer Ray Johnson said last week that he supported nationally consistent laws to deal with the threats posed by outlaw motorcycle gangs. The Canberra Liberals have repeatedly called for anti-consorting laws to be introduced in line with jurisdictions including NSW, but ACT Attorney-General Gordon Ramsay said such laws had been proven ineffective and the ACT government was "not the slightest bit interested" in them. Mr Edmonds said the territory government should not rush to pass laws simply because police said they needed more powers to curb a spike on bikie-related crime, or because other jurisdictions had done so. "What the ACT Liberals and others who support such changes consistently seem to ignore is that the ACT is different to the rest of Australia, partly because we have a Human Rights Act," he said. "We cannot simply cherry-pick the human rights we like and discard the rest, or limit the rights of some, without affecting the rights of all." Mr Edmonds pointed out that in the ACT, magistrates and judges already had the power to make highly restrictive non-association orders when sentencing people found guilty of certain offences. These included all personal violence offences, which are those that involve causing harm, or threatening to cause harm. "[Anti-consorting laws] would extend such powers to those not found guilty of any crime," Mr Edmonds said. "We should not rush to pass legislation that dramatically increases police powers and curtails the civil liberties of all territorians to decide with whom they can associate and where, just because the [police] say they need yet more powers to curb the recent spike in gang crime or because other state governments have done so. "Previous experience is the best predictor of the future, and where [anti-consorting] laws have been in place, they have typically disadvantaged people that are marginalised to start with and who are clearly not members of some sort of criminal organisation." Mr Edmonds pointed to the findings of a 2016 NSW Ombudsman review into that state's anti-consorting laws, which found Aboriginal people accounted for 38 per cent of official anti-consorting warnings despite being just 2.5 per cent of the NSW population. The Canberra Liberals' spokesman on attorney-general issues, Jeremy Hanson, has said the anti-consorting legislation he will table in the Legislative Assembly next week includes appropriate safeguards to protect vulnerable members of the community. However, Winnunga Nimmityjah Aboriginal Health Service chief executive Julie Tongs has spoken out against the idea because of its potential impacts on Indigenous people. Mr Edmonds said recent news coverage of bikie-related incidents gave the impression of a growing problem, but in a lot of cases, the coverage was about gang members being arrested and brought before the courts. He noted the arrests of the president and acting president of the newly arrived Satudarah motorcycle gang, which happened in the space of two weeks. "To my mind, if they’ve only just come to town and already we’ve got two senior members who’ve been arrested, that suggests to me that police do clearly have their finger on the pulse of bikie activity in Canberra and that their current powers are quite ample to deal with the problem," Mr Edmonds said. Police Minister Mick Gentleman told the Sunday Canberra Times last week intelligence suggested while the number of active bikie gangs in the ACT had increased, the number of gang members hadn't. "What [gang members] are doing is patching over," Mr Gentleman said. "We're seeing this change in allegiance from one gang to another, but the brief to me is that they are the same people." The Rebels' stranglehold on Canberra slipped in late 2014, and the Nomads, Comancheros and Satudarah are all now vying for supremacy. The Finks also attempted to set up an ACT chapter last year, but failed.

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