Page 3217 - Week 11 - Thursday, 13 September 1990
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The fact of the matter is that the Government has set out to block the Opposition. It is clearly a political stand. I understand the politics of it, but what it cannot do is pretend that it is anything else. This is a bloody-minded move to prevent the Opposition from introducing legislation. It is a bloody-minded move to get the Government off the hook because its members are embarrassed because of their dismal performance in the production of meaningful legislation for consideration by this Assembly.
MRS GRASSBY (11.55): Mr Speaker, what a fake! That is all I can say. Human rights are the right of every citizen in the ACT and we do not have a Human Rights Act. We, as an Opposition, with the very little means we have, have prepared a Bill and brought it into this house.
The Residents Rally party, led by the leader, Mr Collaery, who was always telling people that he stood for human rights, spent most of the time when we were the Government talking about a human rights Bill and asking why we did not bring one into the house. Now he has the chance to do something about it. We have brought one into the house, and what has he done? He has used some part of an Act that is in the green book and says that we cannot do it. Yet we look at the budget and there is money being provided in the budget to do exactly what we want to do. If he found the Bill was not to his liking or to his law officers' liking - and I am not sure that would be true, anyway - we could easily have sat down and talked about that, or it could have been changed in the detail stage.
There is no rhyme or reason for doing what the Attorney-General is doing. I get the feeling that the Attorney-General is just jealous of the fact that, with our meagre ways of being able to do it and with very little staff, we could bring a Human Rights Bill into this house. The people of Canberra believe that we can put our money where our mouth is, not like the Attorney-General who keeps telling us that the Residents Rally believes in the human rights of the people of Canberra, and, of course, it has been shown today that its members do not. By their words we shall know them, and their deeds; and this is what the people in Canberra will know them for.
It really upsets me to think that he would pull this gag to stop us having a Human Rights Bill. As I said, he knows he can change it in the detail stage. The Government has the numbers. It would be very simple, even if he did not want to sit down and talk to our leader about it. But, no, he pulls this on so that we do not have to have a Bill; or, Mr Speaker, is it really the truth that there is no real business? If we look at what the Government has brought into the house in the last few months, they are either Bills that were in the pipeline with our Government, or ministerial statements. We waste time speaking on ministerial statements.
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