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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 2 Hansard (1 March) . . Page.. 430 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

The Labor Party will support Ms Tucker's motion and await with interest a response to the request which Ms Tucker made to the Government to volunteer to resubmit to the Senate inquiry, in which case Ms Tucker is prepared to withdraw her motion. I would commend that course of action to the Government. If the Government does not respond to that offer, the Labor Party will be supporting this motion.

MR HUMPHRIES (Treasurer, Attorney-General and Minister for Justice and Community Safety) (12.19): Mr Speaker, let me start by putting on the record very clearly the Government's endorsement of the views expressed by a number of members around this place about the significant effect on indigenous people in Australia of a program or a policy which results in their imprisonment, particularly imprisonment in circumstances which it might be argued are trivial. There is absolutely no doubt about the need of Australia as a community to come to grips with the very significant social problems which Aboriginal Australians face. The imprisonment of those Australians in much greater numbers than is the case for white Australians is a matter of considerable concern. I do not wish anything I have to say in this debate to be construed as an endorsement of the effect of laws such as those in the Northern Territory or Western Australia on Aboriginal people.

It is the Government's view that the issue which was the subject of the submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee was an issue of the appropriate exercise of a very significant power on the part of the Federal Government or the Federal Parliament - a power which, if exercised at random, if exercised without due regard to the impact on the federal system which is a feature of Australia's system of government, will have a most unfortunate, most damaging effect on the way in which Australia and Australians operate.

The submission which is the subject of this motion today makes very little mention of mandatory sentencing at all. It certainly makes no case whatever for the principle or moral right of any jurisdiction to legislate to make a particular citizen go to gaol because a law says that their particular conduct triggers an automatic gaol sentence. The ACT Government's submission in this exercise was entirely about consistency on the basis of the ACT and the Northern Territory and, essentially in this debate, other jurisdictions having the capacity to be able to legislate on behalf of the citizens who elect them on areas of intimate interest and concern for those electors when making that decision.

In other words, it was the view of the ACT Government that we should oppose a possible Commonwealth move against mandatory sentencing laws in the Northern Territory and perhaps Western Australia on the same basis that the ACT Government and others in this place opposed the move by the Federal Parliament to override the laws of the ACT and the Northern Territory with respect to euthanasia. I have no doubt that the same principle will come into play in the future when again people in the Federal Parliament take the view that the self-governing rights of citizens in the Territories, and perhaps in some of the States, should be overridden, using powers at the disposal of the Federal Parliament.

It is extremely difficult to enter into such a debate without triggering an expectation that powers once exercised will not be exercised again. It is very difficult to argue that the Federal Parliament - should it move so far into overriding the views of self-governing,

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