ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION ACT 1994 - SECT 476
Failure to attend, answer questions or nominate representative
ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION ACT 1994 - SECT 476
Failure to attend, answer questions or nominate representative
476 Failure to attend, answer questions or nominate representative
(1) This section applies if—
(a) an authorised person requires a person
under section 465to—
(i) answer a question; or
(ii) if the person is a
corporation—nominate an executive officer or employee of the corporation to
answer a question as the corporation’s representative; or
(iii) attend a
stated reasonable place at a stated reasonable time, to answer questions; but
(2) The person must comply with the
requirement, unless the person has a reasonable excuse for not complying with
it.
Penalty—
Maximum penalty—50 penalty units.
(3) For subsection
(2) , it is not a reasonable excuse for an individual to fail to answer a
question that complying with the requirement might tend to incriminate the
individual.
(4) However, incriminating evidence for an individual who answers
a question is not admissible in evidence against the individual in a civil or
criminal proceeding, other than a proceeding for an offence for which the
falsity or misleading nature of the answer is relevant.
(5) The person does
not commit an offence against this section if the information sought by the
authorised person is not in fact relevant to the offence.
(6) In this
section—
"incriminating evidence" , for an individual who answers a question, means
evidence of, or directly or indirectly derived from, the answer that might
tend to incriminate the individual.