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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 13 Hansard (3 December) . . Page.. 4285 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

The Government has been faced with a change in Commonwealth policy. I need to put on the record, as I have already done, that I do not particularly welcome that change in policy. I think, as in the area of legal aid, it has the potential not only to hurt the ACT fiscus but also, more seriously, to occasion some disadvantage to people who require the assistance of mechanisms such as discrimination and equal rights legislation.

I agree with Mr Kaine that it is important for the ACT to accept a fuller degree of responsibility for management of our discrimination function. Perhaps it is, as he suggests, a sign of growing up in the ACT that we take this function fully into our own hands and manage the process more to our own design and our own making than to that of the Commonwealth. One casualty of that process may be the individuals who approach a particular organisation, be it an ACT discrimination organisation, a discrimination commissioner, the Magistrates Court or somebody else, or the Commonwealth discrimination function, whatever it may be in the future. Such a person approaching an organisation to seek assistance or relief may be disadvantaged by the fact that there are other organisations working within the same field and potentially providing relief who may be more appropriate to meet their needs and, indeed, may be the body or organisation or authority to which they should appropriately turn to obtain relief from a particular problem. That is the risk, of course, of separating the ACT's function from the Commonwealth's function.

As I have said, we have tried to make a virtue of necessity in this case, and the ACT has taken the opportunity, occasioned by a Commonwealth withdrawal in this area from funding at the level we have enjoyed in the past, to reorganise our discrimination function and to provide a level of service to the ACT community that will remain appropriate and effective but will focus on areas that I believe are more appropriately the focus of legislation in this field. I believe, for example, that it is appropriate that we look in the present structure at separation of the conciliation function from the determination function in the work of the discrimination process and in particular in the operation of the legislation.

It is my belief, and not only in the field of discrimination legislation, that we ought to move much more strongly towards the encouragement of conciliation processes generally in the resolution of disputes in our community. The separation of these two elements of the process that previously had been one in the ACT provides us with an opportunity to put emphasis on that process of conciliation and the overviewing of the way in which discrimination issues are handled in an informal sense in the Territory. That function, I think, is one we can emphasise under the new arrangements, while leaving the access that people need to have to hearings, to the making of orders, in the hands of the Magistrates Court acting as a discrimination tribunal in order to ensure that there is appropriate relief for those people who require it. The figures record that most people who approach our present Discrimination Commissioner for relief do not proceed to formal hearings before the commissioner. The matters are dealt with in a variety of other ways, and it would be appropriate, therefore, to think about how we can maximise opportunities and benefits to people who come before the system at that more favoured end or more used end of the spectrum more than we do at the present time.

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