Page 2835 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 September 1994
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a country of fewer than 20 million people, when we choose to run our affairs by way of eight State and Territory parliaments and a Federal Parliament, you are inevitably going to have a more complex legal system than you need to have and hence a more expensive legal system.
The Prime Minister made the point that a very sensible goal for 2001 would be to aim to have a uniform criminal law throughout Australia. For all the very sensible reasons - and Mr Humphries canvassed many of them - it is absurd that a citizen who moves across a State border, which is becoming increasingly less relevant as we move to a national market and a national economy and seeing ourselves as a nation, should be subject to radically different legal regimes. The cost of informing people of their legal rights is magnified. It is not possible to buy a simple book that tells the Australian citizen what their rights are. They are not published, but they seem to be fairly complex. They have a chapter and then a whole series of, "This is not quite the case in Victoria and it differs in Queensland, and there is a separate regime in South Australia". You cannot even publish simple information for citizens of Australia about what their legal rights and duties are, because the situation varies so much from State to State.
Unfortunately, at the time the Prime Minister made those eminently sensible remarks, the controversy over the Tasmanian gay laws was raging, and a number of conservative politicians in the Federal Parliament and in States around Australia were immediately frightened - it immediately frightened the horses - and they assumed that the Prime Minister's very sane and sensible call for a single criminal law throughout this country was part of some dastardly Labor plot to centralise power in Canberra. There was a series of hysterical press releases issued, and rantings from the parapets of the various State parliaments around Australia, about the evils of a uniform Criminal Code.
I am sure that many of my counterpart Attorneys-General who are of a conservative persuasion would have been wincing at some of their colleagues' extreme reactions, because this is not an area that we should play silly partisan politics over. For too long Australia has had inefficiencies because we have a first recourse to States rights and we say that we simply cannot in principle move for uniformity because it would mean a loss of States rights. As Gough Whitlam said 20 years ago, "States do not have rights. People have rights". They are the things we should be focusing on.
I welcome Mr Humphries's agreement at least to go down the path of reform here. As I said when I introduced this, this will not be something we will be rushing through. We will want a lot of debate on the subject. The Prime Minister's goal of 2001 to finish this codification of the criminal law exercise is probably about right. So we have a few Assemblies to go before it is finalised, but it is refreshing that at least in this jurisdiction we have a level of bipartisan agreement that it makes sense to go down the path of national codification. We would have a far more accessible justice system in Australia if those sentiments were shared in State parliaments around the country.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
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