Page 4488 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 19 November 1991
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the preferred view put to me when I was Attorney. I received correspondence on it that said that it should be "Discrimination Bill". I will tell you why, from an ACT politician's point of view, I want to stick to "Discrimination Bill". We have the best Bill in the country. What is wrong with having a different name? We are setting the pace. We are setting a new benchmark in the country.
Again with Mr Jensen's help, I draw members' attention to the objects provision in the Bill, that is, clause 3. Of course, you see that it is to eliminate, as far as possible, discrimination and to promote recognition and acceptance within the community. One of the high roles of this Bill is to perform an educative function. The educative function is surely portrayed through the many provisions relating to acceptable exemptions and the ambit of acceptable exemptions. They include clubs - single sex clubs, ethnic clubs and all the rest. But ethnic clubs cannot go too far in their exceptions. The purpose and objects of the club have to be spelt out in their constitution so that they can discriminate. There is an educative process; there is a surveillance process - I use "surveillance" in its non-pejorative sense - that looks at these acceptable aspects of discrimination in a community.
I think that we should stick to a title that sets our Bill out for what it is. It deals with discrimination better than any other Bill that I have seen in the country. It does that because we had a massive response, which we will go through in the detail stage, from so many eminent authorities and advisers. I want to stress that, from the comments that we received, it is not a clear-cut case that the title should be "Human Rights and Equal Opportunity" or "Anti-Discrimination" or "Discrimination".
A very strong argument was put to me by the Women's Consultative Council, when I met with them, that it should not be "Discrimination" because that word is, of course, associated with the ills that the Women's Consultative Council particularly try to tackle. I determined that there was an emotive response from the Women's Consultative Council to that term, and I can understand it. That was the highest case that was put to me against the use of the term "discrimination".
When I look at the term "human rights" from the perspective of where I worked for years in human rights abroad and in Australia, I think in far broader terms than our local provincial legislation. Human rights deals with the UN convention on the rights of refugees. It deals with issues that go beyond this Bill, such as persecution on the basis of social origin. We have not included social origin or social class in this Bill. I am surprised that the Labor Party did not deal with that.
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