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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (24 May) . . Page.. 1631 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

The legislation, as it stands, casts victims of crime into two classes. Members of the police force, the fire brigade and the ambulance service and victims of sexual assault are entitled to apply for financial assistance by way of reasonable compensation for pain and suffering, up to an amount of $50,000. All other victims of crime are entitled to apply for special assistance in an amount of $30,000, after they have obtained assistance from the victims services scheme as is reasonably available and if, and only if, it is an extremely serious and permanent injury.

Are Mr Rugendyke, Mr Osborne and the Liberal government so much less concerned for victims of domestic violence than they are for the police? Are they so much less concerned for other innocent people whose lives have been seriously upset by crime? Are they really comfortable with this inequity?

Speaking of the police, why is it that they are not required to obtain assistance from the victims services scheme? If the purpose of the scheme is to provide timely and appropriate support and to ensure that people applying for financial assistance would truly benefit from it and are not just out to rort the system, why on earth should the police, fire fighters, ambulance officers or victims of sexual assault not be required to obtain such assistance? Is it because police do not rort, but bank tellers do? I do not think so.

Mr Humphries, the Attorney-General, in a letter to me on 7 March 2000, argued these special entitlements are a form of positive discrimination. The issue in contention, according to Mr Humphries, is whether the particular instance of positive discrimination is justified. This was an interesting argument, coming as it did three months after the debate, that the special entitlements in this legislation are a form of positive discrimination. Section 27 of the Discrimination Act, measures intended to achieve equality, addresses the issue of positive discrimination in the following way:

Subsection 3(b) of section 109, grant of exemptions, refers to "the desirability, where relevant, of certain discriminatory actions being permitted for the purpose of redressing the effects of past discrimination".

I referred Mr Humphries' explanation to the Discrimination Commissioner on 11 April. In that letter I said I would be interested to learn the views of the Discrimination Commissioner on the notion of positive discrimination and whether it can be seen fairly to apply to the separate classes of entitlement in the 1999 act. The Discrimination Commissioner wrote back on 28 April making it clear, of course, that an apparently discriminatory act undertaken to comply with this law will not generally constitute unlawful discrimination.

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