Where an offender convicted of a Commonwealth offence has dependent children, s 16A(2)(p) of the Crimes Act 1914 (Cth) requires the sentencing court to obtain sufficient information about the probable effect of the sentence on those children. A bare acknowledgment that the sentence will affect the children, without inquiry into their circumstances or obtaining a pre-sentence report, does not satisfy the statutory requirement. The dissent (Pidgeon J) held that where the offence is too serious for a non-custodial sentence, detailed inquiries would be pointless.
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