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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 11 Hansard (8 December) . . Page.. 3307 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Ms Tucker - I am sorry she is not here - showed a quite breathtaking lack of understanding of what is going on in this area. The fact is that it will not be all that often that people will be in the position of requiring protection orders during times when the court is open. These things tend to take place - this is a matter of statistics - in the evenings and on weekends when spouses, often partners, husbands, wives, or whatever, are at home together in the family home or in some environment where they are going to come in contact with people who are likely to be the subject of such orders. It is just bizarre, frankly, to suggest that there should be any problem with focusing this system on a mechanism which allows you to take out those orders after hours. Of course that is going to be the necessary emphasis of this scheme.

It also follows, Mr Speaker, from the fact that we have to make orders available on an after-hours basis, that some mechanism needs to be put in place to ensure that people are able to get the orders after hours and are able to ensure that they are served on the proposed respondent.

I think we must bear in mind one very important matter. A protection order or an interim protection order is of little or no value whatsoever if it is not served on the person against whom it is directed. If you are a woman and you are, for example, subject to domestic violence or threat of domestic violence from your spouse and you go to the court and you get a protection order, the order is of no use to you until you have it served on the party who is threatening you. This is why the legislation says quite explicitly that a capacity should exist for a person to be taken into detention for up to four hours - not for four hours in all cases but up to four hours - to permit a protection order to be served.

With great respect to those who have posed all sorts of problems with this, I ask them to seriously address the question of what the alternative might be in this circumstance. We could take out the provision about detention altogether but, Mr Speaker, what we do when we do that is expose many people to the lack of protection by this form of order of the court at all, because, as I say, if an order is not served it is not of much value.

Mr Speaker, members have made reference to international obligations Australia has signed which acknowledge the rights of people. Of course, in this week in which we are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the Government would be the last party to want to come forward and start to erode the rights of people in these circumstances. But I think members should go back and have a look at what those particular covenants and international agreements say before they adopt or support suggestions that in some way this legislation represents a departure from those responsibilities at international level. Quite clearly, on any reading, they do not. For example, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states at article 9.1:

Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention. No one shall be deprived of his liberty except on such grounds and in accordance with such procedure as are established by law.

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