Page 1072 - Week 04 - Thursday, 1 April 1993
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Madam Speaker, I have no personal quarrel with Mr Williams and I acknowledge that Mr Williams has done a lot of work for a lot of families in Canberra. I profoundly disagree with many of Mr Williams's views on the issue of domestic violence. The reasonable and even-tempered arguments on page 1 of Mr Williams's letter would have the effect of totally changing domestic violence legislation. It would no longer be the DV legislation that we now know. A system whereby you have to have a full hearing before any protection order is issued is not domestic violence legislation. It is not legislation which provides immediate protection for a woman. It is simply the ability to lay an assault charge. That is an issue on which I fundamentally disagree with Mr Williams and would be happy to debate at any time. Had Mr Williams merely argued the case for that, we would have had no quarrel. However, Mr Williams went much further. Perhaps he did not intend to go this far, but he did. It is in his letter. He wrote:
Should the law and the ACT government not yield to our request, then we will have no alternative but to take immediate steps to institute a legal challenge in the courts which will effectively outlaw all domestic violence legislation. This will have the effect of leaving many women and children vulnerable and unprotected in the whole Australian community.
I will not read that again; I have read it a number of times. No-one reading that cannot accept that it would have been reasonable for me to take that as a threat. Clearly, it is couched as a threat. You only need to grammatically analyse it. I think my comment that that was extremist ratbaggery is a comment which members, even if they disagree, would say is a fair form of comment. Mr Williams's letter was couched in such a way that it gave me no alternative but to not attend. It contained an incredibly serious threat of legal action to totally undermine domestic violence legislation and I regarded that with, I guess, the contempt which it deserved. I think it is unfortunate that Mr Williams cast the letter in such a way.
My polite response to him, which I referred to in the chamber, invited the Lone Fathers Association and anyone associated with that organisation to contribute to the debate on the future of domestic violence legislation which the Government is conducting in the community through the Community Law Reform Committee. It is not as though we are closing our mind to their views. We welcome their views through the appropriate forum, but the threatening tone of that letter, I think, does no credit to Mr Williams. Perhaps if Mr Williams had his time over again he would not have written a letter in quite those terms.
When I referred to that in debate some members looked surprised. Perhaps when members read the letter they had not paid sufficient attention to that paragraph and what it meant, what the implications were - that if we did not make this fundamental change to remove the immediacy of domestic violence legislation, if we did not make this change to say that before there can be an effective order protecting a woman there must be a full hearing, they would move to destroy the whole system. Perhaps members, not having been aware of that, took it simply as an invitation to attend a public meeting.
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