Page 5288 - Week 16 - Thursday, 28 November 1991
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meaningless and do not reflect the sensible part of this Bill which sets a proper community standard for discrimination that we can practise. The term "equal opportunity" is not an easy handle, in my view, for multicultural groups and people of a non-English speaking background.
On balance, I agreed originally with "Discrimination", as I do now. For the record, I have given my reasons. Time will tell and, subject to the next election, the Chief Minister can shake this term out if she gets power in her own right. But at this stage the Bill has been drafted with the term "discrimination" right through it. You will need more than just a name change, I suggest, in the future.
DR KINLOCH (5.16): Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, Mr Collaery has made a kind reference to my word skills. I would not want to claim those skills. Perhaps we should consult Professor Ralph Elliott. But in consulting the big Oxford English Dictionary, the multi-volume one, we find that there are four main meanings of the word "discrimination" - indeed, more, if you start going to all the adjectives and adverbs and composites of "discrimination". At least one of those meanings is now obsolete and there is no point in my discussing it here. Another one is a technical term in logic and mathematics. There is no point in discussing that one here either.
Discrimination, as many people used to use it, certainly was a very positive term. Someone had a good sense of discrimination. One discriminated carefully. One discriminated between A and B, between work of art A and work of art B, et cetera. It was a term that had a very positive meaning. However, it would seem that in the growth of the language what really should be "discrimination against" - that is, if you could imagine "discrimination against" as one word rather than two words - has in a sense become the word "discrimination", with its pejorative meaning. There are examples in the OED of the word being used in that way.
I am not making a judgment about it. I wish that I did not have to. It seems to me to be playing word games. But what has happened is that a growing late meaning of the word "discrimination" has now taken over and become the substitute for "discrimination against". I see the logic for having that late meaning in the Bill, although I am very sad to see what has happened to that old word "discrimination".
MS FOLLETT (Chief Minister and Treasurer) (5.18): Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, I really cannot believe what I am hearing from Mr Collaery and Dr Kinloch. It seems to me that they are both saying, by implication and in fact, that this Bill is about some pleasant kind of discrimination which we should all be proud of - the ability to discriminate. Of course, what the Bill is all about is
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