Page 2679 - Week 12 - Thursday, 16 November 1989
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providing licence to children to mix with prostitutes and drug addicts and to run around buying pornography. What nonsense! The claim would be laughable if it were not so dangerously wrong. It ignores the fact that freedom of association and the right to information are both subject to a country's laws, including laws on morals. It ignores, too, the very existence of article 5. Mr Stevenson's views are more than nitpicking. They are dangerous and loaded pedantry, and I will leave it at that.
What also disturbs me is the assumption in the third part of the motion that children's or any other rights are no more important that a parochial issue. These rights, any rights, should exist uniformly and equally throughout the country, and preferably throughout the world, or they are not rights at all.
The Federal Government should take, and has taken, responsibility on this. It is not an issue open to us to jump in and expect to make some special adjustments for what we see as local conditions - tinkering with rights. Circumscribing them in that way will leave us and our children no better off than South Africa, Chile and the ever dwindling communist world.
MR COLLAERY (4.46): Mr Speaker, I wish to move the following amendment:
That all words after "That" be omitted and the following substituted: "the Assembly notes that the Federal Government will not ratify the draft UN convention on the rights of the child until the terms of the convention are settled and further consultation with all State and territory governments takes place".
Mr Speaker, I wish to speak to the amendment.
Mrs Grassby: You would do anything to get Stevenson's vote.
MR COLLAERY: Minister Grassby said that I am seeking Mr Stevenson's vote. I might remind her that I have discussed this with her party leader, and I might remind the Minister that the Human Rights Commission Act was repealed by Act No. 126 of 1986. I do not know who wrote your speech.
Mrs Grassby: I wrote it myself.
MR COLLAERY: Well, that is obvious.
Mrs Grassby: That is all right. You are not very good at it either.
MR COLLAERY: I will leave you alone, Ellnor. Mr Speaker, as the Chief Minister correctly said, the present draft has been endorsed by the committee on human rights of the General Assembly. It has been passed for adoption by that
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