Page 4836 - Week 16 - Thursday, 29 November 1990
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MR HUMPHRIES (Minister for Health, Education and the Arts) (3.26): Mr Speaker, I certainly welcome this legislation and not in the disingenuous way that those opposite have pretended to welcome it. The fact is that this is an area in which the ACT needs to move, as other States have moved, and where we need to make up some ground that has been lost by inaction in previous years. I have to put on the record that my waiting and watching last year, while in opposition, for some movement by the then Government, now the Opposition, on this front was in vain. I observed nothing at all in this area - other than the occasional platitudes in question time and elsewhere - until two days after the motion of no confidence was moved in the former Government. Then there appeared some kind of discussion paper or statement of intent by those opposite that they were going to move quickly to deal with anti-discrimination legislation. It was a curious coincidence that they should come out days before the Government was to meet what it knew then to be its inevitable fate.
However, I suppose to Ms Follett's credit, she produced a Bill in due course; a Bill described as a Human Rights Bill, on which she had apparently borrowed heavily from the Northern Territory and which she triumphantly presented as the solution to the Territory's problems. It is pretty clear, Mr Speaker, by the introduction of that earlier Bill, that the Opposition were very fearful that this Government would eventually be able to intrude upon an area, which it, the Labor Party, considered to be sacred ground, namely, that some other party in this place might be producing legislation to protect human rights when everybody knows that it is the Australian Labor Party which is the champion of human rights. How dare anybody else presume to come to parliament and produce a Bill pretending to protect the human rights of citizens of the ACT.
I have sad news for them. There are other people who are very concerned and involved in matters of human rights, not the least our Attorney-General, and the Bill he has produced, I am confident, will be seen widely as a far more productive document, a far more effective weapon in the fight against discrimination than the half-baked, rather rushed document which Ms Follett tabled a few weeks ago.
I am also curious about certain discrepancies and inadequacies in the other document which this document - that is the Attorney-General's draft Bill - certainly remedies. I know that, in her statement last year about her intention to introduce anti-discrimination legislation, Ms Follett intended, she said, to introduce provisions dealing with discrimination on the basis of political or religious views, yet when her Bill was actually introduced it failed to include those grounds as grounds on which action might be taken for discrimination. That is only one of many signs in that other Bill of haste and inadequate thinking through of the issues before they were properly
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