Page 1332 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 16 April 1991
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MR COLLAERY (Attorney-General) (9.00): I wish to make a few comments. I congratulate Mr Humphries on his prelude. I also want to respond to the Leader of the Opposition's comments regarding the broader issues that will be incorporated in the Discrimination Bill. The response to the Discrimination Bill amounted to some 400 pages of comment. There have been highly significant submissions from national sources, particularly, I have noted with interest, from South Australia again. Some of those comments I am quite happy to make available to Ms Follett. She will see that they are laudatory comments about some aspects of the Bill. Those comments, in the language of the South Australian commissioner and also in the Women's Electoral Lobby submission, put the ACT at the forefront.
Unfortunately, there are other issues that need further clarification because the rest of the anti-discrimination human rights community decided that this document is to be the model for the nation. Therefore, they have made very heavy demands on us to bring in the very best and most complete Bill possible.
Ms Follett: You can have mine. I offered you mine.
MR COLLAERY: Ms Follett says, "You can have mine". Ms Follett's Bill is a copy from another assembly. It is comprehensively deficient on all these matters that I speak of. I am sure she realises that. The challenges are great to the officials working on this matter. There are dedicated men and women working on this Bill. It ill behoves us to, in effect, bag their work routine in this Assembly. I believe that the Leader of the Opposition is bagging the officials who report to me almost daily and weekly on this project. It is a massive project. I did not see it undertaken during the time the Leader of the Opposition was in government.
MR HUMPHRIES (Minister for Health, Education and the Arts) (9.03), in reply: I am pleased to note that we have had, at least up until the last few minutes, a chorus of agreement on the need to introduce the Inebriates Bill 1991 and pass it, I am sure, swiftly. It is nice to see that the cacophony of opposition that we sometimes get in this place is being replaced by people in tune.
I know that we are all looking forward, as are Mr Collaery and others, to the Discrimination Bill. I assure those opposite that the house will be tuneful on that occasion. In fact, the house will reverberate to the sound of a hallelujah chorus, or something very similar, when we actually get around to bringing that Bill forward after due processes of consultation.
As Ms Follett accurately pointed out, the ACT is bound by the Commonwealth Sex Discrimination Act 1984. That Act, as Ms Follett pointed out, requires the removal of sexist terminology from the legislation. It is not a binding that
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