Page 4465 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 19 November 1991
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MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Duby says, "I do not, you bastard". I think he was being facetious, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker. I am sure that that is a matter for no great concern.
As an example of what I am saying, I might enter a restaurant and choose to sit at a table which is away from people who are smoking. That is a form of discrimination. I am discriminating, on the matter of where I might sit, on the basis of what other people in the room are doing or on a particular attribute of those people. One might choose the seat that one takes on a bus on the basis of who it is that one wants to be near, and who one does not want to be near. One forms relationships and marries people on the basis of discrimination. All those sorts of things, obviously, are very much a part of everyday life.
The point of this legislation, of course, is to identify those sorts of discrimination which we as a community believe are intolerable and ought not to be permitted as a basis of conduct, and which are properly brought within the ambit of the law. I add the second proviso because there are, naturally, a number of instances of discrimination which one regrets or even abhors and which are not logically or practically capable of being legislated against. For example, if a person chooses not to sit next to an Aboriginal person on a bus, that attitude is regrettable, in the extreme perhaps; but it is not an attitude that we can legislate against. We cannot outlaw bigotry per se, but we can outlaw manifestations of bigotry as they might occur to lawmakers.
As such, the list of grounds set forth in the legislation, particularly in clause 7, is generally welcomed by the Liberal Party. The grounds mentioned there are, I think we would all agree, grounds which ought not to be the basis of decisions by persons having authority in certain circumstances; for example, in relation to housing, employment, the offering of educational opportunities or any of the other particular instances set forth in later clauses of the Bill. I cannot consider any of those there to be inappropriate, although there is, of course, another point to do with the question of definition and limiting the effect and operation of these particular provisions, which I will come to in a moment.
Clause 8 of the Bill talks about what constitutes discrimination. I think generally I would agree with the terms of that clause, although I believe that, at the same time, there is some question, particularly in respect of paragraph 8(1)(a), about what the treatment of someone "unfavourably" really means. Where one chooses between two people - for example, in an employment application - one, of course, treats one favourably and one unfavourably, and there are issues raised there of how much one can treat anybody favourably without, by implication, treating somebody else unfavourably. But that is probably an esoteric point, which I will not pursue.
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