Page 666 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 21 March 1990
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Federal human rights office and, more importantly, the references that the Leader of the Opposition made to our failure to bring on anti-discrimination and other human rights legislation. Those issues are extremely well advanced in our Government. Cabinet decisions, I can inform the house, are imminent on the subject.
But on the subject, firstly, of an interjection that Mrs Grassby made earlier about the social conscience of this Government and that we have failed to open a human rights office here, let me read from a letter to the editor of the Canberra Times from the former Chairman of the Human Rights Commission here, Mr Peter Bailey. I will table this in a moment. Among other things, Mr Bailey says:
The current Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (...based in Sydney) has shown little interest in building up its complaint jurisdiction. It currently handles less than half the number of complaints the former Commission handled. Its servicing of the ACT is even less ...
He goes on to make quite substantive and informed criticisms of that commission's perceived role for this Territory.
It was a Federal Labor government that removed the commission, and I find it the height of hypocrisy to have put on the papers here a suggestion that we have been indiligent in not getting - as if we constitutionally could - the Commonwealth to reopen its office here. The Commonwealth is at liberty to open its office here whenever it likes; it has not done it. I suggest that once again this factionalised group across the way has been unable to properly direct its energies, which should have been to their own kind over the other side. The Government will bring forward innovative, comprehensive anti-discrimination laws. It is proceeding with great discretion, sensitivity and, in a consultative manner, with a restructuring of the courts system.
The list of achievements of the Kaine Government is a response to claims made by the Opposition. The document was not put out through our initiative but was provoked by a press release from the Opposition. Some of the claims that Ms Follett made were very selective. She said, for example, that the Government had announced that the $100,000 for a community mediation service was her decision. The document that we released to the press said, "(NB: Follett Government initiative)". I thought it was less than generous of the Leader of the Opposition to impute otherwise.
It is really somewhat childish for this debate to be based around what the Opposition has done and what we have done. The real issue is what we will do. This Government will bring this Territory out of the bind that it has been in as
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