STATE OF TASMANIA v SIMON SCOTT BENNETT 19 SEPTEMBER 2024
COMMENTS ON PASSING SENTENCE PEARCE J
Simon Bennett, you have breached the conditions of a community service order which I made on 28 March 2018. That order was made prior to the amendments to the Sentencing Act which introduced community correction orders in substitution for community service orders.
You pleaded guilty to personation and dishonestly acquiring a financial advantage by, in 2016, pretending to be your partner’s father to facilitate a credit card application. You were ordered to perform 49 hours of community service. A couple of months earlier a magistrate had ordered that you perform 56 hours of community service for drug and driving offences. It took you until 10 May 2021, more than three years, to complete that 56 hours. Until this application was made you had only completed 12.5 hours of the 49 hours, and only then by attending drug and alcohol counselling. As a result, even though that order was made more than six years ago it remains current. In the meantime you breached the order by failing to attend as directed on nine occasions, failing to keep appointments with a probation officer on five occasions and failing to return phone calls on another five occasions. Until this application was heard the last contact that Community Corrections had with you was by phone on 13 June 2023 despite warnings since then. You claimed to be medically unfit to perform community service but when asked for evidence of that claim failed to provide it. You also breached the order by committing other offences. On 21 September 2021 a magistrate imposed a wholly suspended six month sentence for breaches of bail and dishonesty and driving offences committed between 2018 and 2020. On 8 December 2023 a magistrate imposed two four week suspended sentences for bail, drug, driving and firearm offences.
You claim to have been drug free for three years. For some of the time there was in fact a medical explanation for your failure to complete the community service. Surgery was required to address the issue, but you are now fit enough again. That does not fully explain your overall lack of compliance over such a prolonged period and failure to communicate with Community Corrections. It was five years before breach proceedings were commenced. I am now advised that your attendance at alcohol and drug counselling services, including nine more sessions this year, have been credited against the community service such that you have performed 20 hours and there are 29 hours now outstanding on this order.
When I imposed sentence I commented that I did not consider imprisonment to be appropriate. In making that comment I took into account your plea of guilty and the nature of the crimes, but also an assumption that you would perform the community service ordered. Instead, you treated your obligations with apparent disdain. Unless court orders are complied with or enforced there is an unacceptable a risk that you and others who are subject to them will fail to take the obligations imposed on them seriously enough, and the force of the orders will be undermined.
I may deal with you as if you have just been found guilty of that offence. So, in an attempt to ensure compliance I have decided to substitute the community service order with a term of imprisonment suspended on condition that you perform community service. Although you have performed 19 hours of the order I made I intend to effectively increase the hours by requiring 42 further hours to be performed. I would make clear that the Court would expect strict compliance, and a prompt breach application if you fail to comply. In that case it is very likely that you will be required to serve the term of imprisonment I am about to impose unless there are very good reasons to take a different course.
I order that the community service order made on 28 March 2018 is cancelled. You are sentenced to imprisonment for one month wholly suspended for nine months on condition that, within that period, you perform 42 hours of community service. I record that it is my intention that s 24(5A) of the Sentencing Act apply to the order just made.