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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 13 Hansard (25 November) . . Page.. 4578 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

It is something that should be put to a referendum. The Chief Minister is so proud of the legislation and thinks it is so important. I accept that he genuinely believes this is for the public good but I totally disagree. I think it is not, and will not prove to be, for the public good. But if he feels that way, at least give the people of the ACT a chance to vote on something that is going to have more of an impact on their daily lives than any other piece of legislation we have seen. Have the guts to put this to a referendum. I do not believe in lots of things going to referendums. Governments are here to govern, but on something as fundamental as this, where there is growing community angst about it, where it is going to have such a big effect, people should be given a chance to say whether they want it or not.

I certainly disagree very much with the Chief Minister that at the end of the day this will protect more rights than not. It will probably interfere more with people's legitimate rights than it will help. I know the Chief Minister has the numbers, but I suspect at the end of this process we will end up with something that will not enhance rights and, if anything, will probably have an adverse effect in many ways. No interest has been shown in this legislation during the consultative process. The government has responded and is now going ahead. It has introduced a bill that we will debate early in the New Year.

It could be far worse. At least as a result of the committee consultative process, some of the ideas have been honed back a bit. But it is still potentially a very dangerous piece of legislation. This is one of the freest countries in the world. Our rights have been protected by convention and by laws that in themselves have many sections that deal with rights. For example, part 10 to part 13 of the Crimes Act deals with the legitimate rights of people charged. Section 7 of the Discrimination Act lists a series of instances where people cannot be discriminated against. We have very strong conventions and we have the common law that is enshrined in our legal system. That is regularly updated by judgments made by superior courts including the ultimate court, the High Court. Our own free conventions and the type of place Australia has evolved into in the past 200 years are the things that protect our real rights.

These things give balance in our society. You cannot give balance by simply bunging in a bill of rights. When he introduced the government's response the Chief Minister quoted Eleanor Roosevelt. I agree with those statements. They show quite clearly that if people and society are not prepared and are not able to naturally provide rights and act in a civil way, a bill is certainly not going to do that. The bill of rights didn't work in the Soviet Union. It is one of the most brilliant documents to read about rights and freedom and people's rights being looked after. But in 1937 some seven million people had been bumped off in the Ukraine through a man-made famine caused by Stalin. Stalin was gleefully hoeing his way through 90 per cent of the upper echelon of the Red Army He was an absolute dictator, probably even far worse than his nasty colleague to the west in Adolph Hitler.

I don't know if the Germans had a bill of rights-or a constitution either-but they probably did. A lot of other nastier regimes we have seen in more recent times also have bills of rights and human rights acts and of course they pay only lip service to them. So, real rights are not in bills like this. They are in a combination of things-conventions, the statute laws and the common law.

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