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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 7 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 2387 ..
MR SPEAKER
: The member's time has expired. Do you wish to continue?MR STEFANIAK
: Mr Speaker, I will use my next 10 minutes, if I may. Anyone who has served in the military-and Mr Pratt will appreciate this-will have been taught what is called the appreciation process. The appreciation process is pretty simple. It is something that we do every day of the year. It involves something as simple as using a lift-you press the button and you appreciate you don't walk into the lift until the doors are open; you do a quick mental appreciation. When solving more complex problems, you look at and work out after being in command of all the facts such things as what is the best course open, and then you set upon that course and go to it.There is also something in the military called situating the appreciation-to start with, you work out the decision you want to rely on and then you justify it; you use a process aimed at leading to the conclusion you started with.
Mr Stanhope
: Like you invent weapons of mass destruction.MR STEFANIAK
: In other words, you know exactly what you want to do to start with, and you just try to justify it. And I think-Mr Stanhope
: That's right. You decide to bomb the crap out of a country so you imagine something exists like nuclear weapons and chemical weapons.MR STEFANIAK
: The Chief Minister talks about weapons of mass destruction. At least they got rid of a particularly vicious dictator, Mr Stanhope. But in terms of this document, this is a classic case of situating the appreciation. It is a classic case of "this is where we want to end up; let's work out some convoluted process to justify getting there".Basically, this is a classic case in point. The budget comes out with a human rights act, and lo and behold, some two and a bit weeks later the consultative committee says, "We recommend a human rights act."I suppose this is not surprising when you consider that before the last election this government made a huge deal in its justice policy about wanting to go down the path of this particular piece of legislation. So there has been a great, convoluted effort to arrive at this.
I cannot think of too many instances where extra money, over and above normal departmental resources, has been put in to get legislation up and running. Yet in this case the government is doing exactly that. The Estimates Committee quite rightly recommended that "the human rights education program be funded from internal resources". Of course, the government does not agree with that. The government talks about its "commitment to the introduction of some form of legislation". It goes on to talk about "developing public sector awareness". It then talks about a "lack of understanding of the bill of rights"-at least it calls it a bill of rights here rather than, as it did in the budget, the human rights act-might lead to failure to understand potential breaches in service provision by the government. It also talks about the need to educate the judiciary.
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