Page 2805 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 14 August 1991
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MR COLLAERY: Mr Berry interjects and says, "Grandstanding". I do not think I have said these matters before. I thought we should go out ourselves and see what we could produce, and then offer it up to the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General. That was the reason why the South Australian Attorney, Chris Sumner, and I decided to take on media and ethics. Most of the members here know what that delivered on my head after the attempt to hold our first media ethics conference in Perth. I cannot address that issue because the only writ I have ever issued in my life is attributable to my attempts to start that media ethics process.
I wish to congratulate the Attorney-General for the effective working relationship he is getting and has, by all accounts, with the Community Law Reform Committee. I am pleased that he has at least, in making this decision, formally given them a widened reference which will assist, presumably, their budget base to match the extra work that is now involved in following the States into that canvas, as I call it. I congratulate the Attorney on adopting Mr Kelly's view that procedural reform is necessary and, of course, the tort of privacy, which is so much in our minds in this outing week, clearly needs work done on it.
I want to say to the Attorney, through you, Mr Speaker, that, at his age and at this stage of what is probably going to be a very large career for him in politics, he should be a little more revolutionary on topics of this nature. I will encourage him to be. I believe that we should not have joined those hidebound States at this stage, particularly following the departure of John Dowd from the group, because he was a reformist, whatever one thinks of his political affiliation. He was strong on civil liberties and he would have been a useful person to lock into so that some of our reforms might be accepted by the other States.
What has happened is that we will tag along now. The intellectual strength of our current Attorney and of our committee is of the first order; but, inevitably, our size and our lack of voice will mean that we have given away the chance, I believe, to come up with something good. We have done that because the Law Society, in particular, disagreed with the direction in which I wanted to go. The Law Society made very clear at the opening of Law Week this year its disagreement with my view that we should not yet join that study. There was a suggestion that I wanted to initiate a study on our own behalf. That was not so.
I wanted us to study different things from a different perspective to see whether we could get real press freedom and deal with the pressing problems in the media in Australia, particularly the state of media ownership, the absence of enforceable internal disciplinary rules and, of course, the absolute joke which the Press Council in this country is. Following reports on the British Press Council and a very interesting study in Britain which the Attorney
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