Page 578 - Week 04 - Thursday, 29 June 1989
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I would enjoin the members of this Assembly to read the several reports of the former Human Rights Commission on the deportation and the situation of young Australian citizens who go, by necessity, abroad with their parents and are deported. One a very clear case comes to my mind of young five-year-old Australian boy, a snowy-haired youngster, who went with his German mother simply because she had failed to apply for permanent residence during her marriage to an Australian citizen and before his schizophrenia resulted in their marriage break-up. Through no fault of her own, she was ordered to leave Australia because she had spent four years here on an over-stayed visitor visa and had not bothered to regularise her position when she was living with that Australian.
That was a dreadful case. It was referred to in a schedule to the Human Rights Commission report, and that report was tabled in the House of Representatives by Mr Bowen, the Attorney-General of the Federal Government. He, of course, tabled that and any number of other reports by the Human Rights Commission, indicating that he did not endorse the recommendations of it.
So let us not be fooled by the social justice realities of the Hawke Government on issues concerning children. They have been swept aside. We are approaching 1990, and we are now starting to see the beginnings of some action. Those of us who work in areas such as that have been deeply concerned at the breaches of these treaties. One hopes that when this Assembly settles down, when we have ordered government in the ACT and a stable, hopefully majority, government we will see some of the various treaties which the Federal Government has signed but to which it has not given effect taken on board by this new Assembly, this new Government in the Australian Capital Territory, and put into effect by us as a signal answer to a Federal government which has been uncaring in signal areas of social justice.
Mr Speaker, the Burdekin report also alluded to the efforts of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. We all know that those officers only visit Canberra, and we were all disturbed at one stage when the original Human Rights Commission was moved out of this city. Be that as it may, the Residents Rally does not endorse the return of that federal commission, because the experience that at least one member of the Rally had with the former Human Rights Commission was that it lacked teeth, that its reports were tabled constantly in the Federal Parliament and overridden by the Federal Attorney-General.
We need to develop our equal opportunity, social justice and human rights recognition machineries in the ACT. Our strategy for youth must put into effect Australia's obligations developed at international forums, including the declaration of the rights of the child and the declaration on the rights of mentally retarded persons, including children and including disabled children who
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