Page 3890 - Week 13 - Thursday, 17 October 1991
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political conviction; and physical, mental or intellectual impairment. No other Australian jurisdiction has this breadth of coverage and, indeed, we are the first jurisdiction to extend protection to those who are responsible for caring for another person.
In extending the Bill to cover parents and carers, we are responding to Australia's international obligations under International Labour Organisation Convention No. 156, Workers with Family Responsibilities, which Australia ratified in March 1990. The convention provides, among other things, for workers with family responsibilities to exercise their right to work without discrimination. The new ground in the Bill will go a long way towards achieving this goal.
However, the Bill throws the net of protection wider than the terms of the convention by not limiting its operation to family responsibilities. This Bill will protect anyone who has responsibility for providing ongoing care and attention for another person, whether or not they are related to each other. This would include, for example, someone who was caring for an elderly neighbour or nursing a friend or partner suffering from AIDS.
The ACT will join the only other jurisdictions - Western Australia and Victoria - that protect people from discrimination on the ground of their religious or political convictions. These terms are not expressly defined in the Bill because it is intended that they be given their natural and wide meaning. Political conviction would include, for example, the expression of political views and participation in political activities. The impairment provisions have been carefully drafted to include conditions such as HIV and AIDS and to ensure that the definition of impairment extends to all kinds of physical, mental and intellectual disability.
The Bill also goes beyond other Australian jurisdictions in extending its protection to those associated with someone in one of the classes protected by the legislation. The initial draft of the legislation that was circulated for comment covered only the relatives, carers and friends of HIV-AIDS sufferers; but this has been widened to include all the grounds. Thus, those who are discriminated against because, for example, they have a family member who has an intellectual impairment or because they work for an AIDS support organisation would be protected.
The Bill also makes it clear that people are protected from discrimination if they do, in fact, have one of the attributes covered by the Bill or in the situation in which someone presumes, perhaps mistakenly, that they have that attribute. One example of this is IV drug users who are discriminated against because it is presumed that they are HIV positive.
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