Page 5287 - Week 16 - Thursday, 28 November 1991
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Clause 8 of the Bill - I do not want to disappoint Ms Follett, but I am not swayed by her argument - under the heading "What constitutes discrimination", says:
For the purposes of this Act, a person discriminates against another person if ...
My colleague Dr Kinloch, who has a great facility with the English language, indicates to me that the expression "a person discriminates", though sound in law and though it will appear all through this legislation, has an awkwardness about it, as he puts it, and that we need different terminology completely because that is a pejorative term. Dr Kinloch could best advance these arguments himself.
The legislation was developed with the title "Discrimination". If only the Chief Minister could understand the situation. The term "discrimination" permeates the whole Bill. It is used as a heading throughout. It is too late, in my view, to get back from the generic term that we have sewn right through the weft and the warp of the Bill. The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Act is a Federal Act, and I do not believe that this Bill, as I said earlier, is accurately described as a human rights Bill. It affects human rights; but human rights instruments are broader and wider and have as a schedule to them international instruments and the like.
I beg to differ with the Chief Minister. I do not think immigrant groups and individuals with English as a second language would easily think of the term "equal opportunity". I think the real issue, the root issue, is discrimination - lawful and unlawful discrimination. So, we are going to be different; but so be it. I do not think we should be too upset about the use of a term that has a connotation it should not have.
Those petitioning the Chief Minister think that the term "discrimination" has a pejorative sense to it; that it implies some oppression. But we discriminate all the time lawfully and properly. There are more words in the Bill about lawful discrimination than there are about unlawful discrimination. I have already made that point. It depends on how people perceive the use of language. I remember being corrected recently for using the term "pack rape". A women's group wrote to me and said that I should not have used that term; that it was an aggressive term. Accepting that rebuke, I can see that some groups have a particular sensitivity to terms.
I accept that the multicultural groups have a particular sensitivity to the term "discrimination", but we should not change our language. I am not advocating that we only ever have English as the language of the law in this country. But the language that the vast majority of us would use is "discrimination". This Bill is about discrimination. I think compromises such as putting "anti" in front of it are
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .