Page 5271 - Week 16 - Thursday, 28 November 1991
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Mr Connolly: But every commission throughout the rest of Australia has.
MR STEVENSON: Mr Connolly mentions that every commissioner in Australia has the same powers. Yes, indeed, he is right. I have already acknowledged full well that there are other tribunals around Australia that also do away with our rights under common law. Perhaps that settles that point. I know that it has happened before; but what we should do is protect our common law rights.
We should protect the right of any individual who is accused. Mr Connolly would say that it is not a charge; it is not an offence. I would suggest that most people in the community would not really mind whether you call it a charge, an offence or unlawful. If they are told that they have done something for which they can go to gaol or for which they can be fined thousands of dollars, that would not make a difference.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (4.14): The basic objection is that Mr Stevenson does not like human rights legislation. He does not like it in the ACT; he does not like it in any other part of Australia or at the Commonwealth level. His objections are spurious because he is raising red herrings that do not exist.
His fundamental and wilful misrepresentation is that an unlawful complaint procedure is a criminal offence which will see you landing in gaol. That is nonsense. Wherever there is a criminal offence created by this Bill, it is dealt with in the ordinary courts of the land, and you have the same rights to legal representation, wherever there is a criminal offence and it is dealt with in the ordinary courts of the land, as you have for any other offence. So, Mr Stevenson's rhetoric about facing gaol without legal representation is stuff and nonsense, and wilfully so, because clause 93 makes it very clear that an act that is unlawful does not constitute an offence. Offences and unlawful acts are very separate things.
In relation to complaints, which is the basis for an unlawful act process, these are dealt with in a commission in an informal manner; and the purpose of saying that you shall not have legal representation, except with leave - so, there is a right to have legal representation if the commissioner chooses to give you that discretion - is to ensure that these procedures do not become the domain of the lawyers. The danger would be, if you had what Mr Stevenson wants - this right to legal representation in all cases - that the whole process would bog down in legalism.
The decision to keep the lawyers out, except with leave, has been made in every jurisdiction throughout Australia. We checked this very carefully, because there was some concern about the New South Wales situation. In New South Wales and in every other State, the Human Rights
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