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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Tuesday, 2 March 2004) . . Page.. 453 ..

Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. However, as I’ve said already, the government has backed away from this model, so the bill we’re voting on today includes only the civil and political rights, and there are no rights to compensation or damages. The main objection to the inclusion of economic, social and cultural rights seemed to be a fear that there would be more direct obligations on departments and on government. This is quite disturbing. It would be entirely possible to set out targets, plans to be moving from where we are now towards a situation that is much more inclusive, much more equal in effect in terms of people’s access to education, health and so on. I’ll talk to this more later.

The Chief Minister has said that these other rights could be included down the track, and that this is only a starting point. I am certainly encouraged by that statement. I will be moving an amendment to this end in the detail stage. Even when we are implementing those two treaties, there would still be no explicit reference in the rights themselves to indigenous people, gay, lesbian or transgender people, the environment, people made vulnerable due to their health status, for example, mental health patients, aged—although children’s rights are addressed—or socioeconomic status, for example, people on low incomes with inadequate access to political or legal representation. The preamble to the bill covers some of these specific areas of need. Point 7 refers to the special significance of human rights to indigenous people. Point 5 notes that the act encourages individuals to see themselves and each other as the holders of rights and as responsible for upholding the human rights of others. The question of responsibility is one I’ll address further later as well, but it certainly does come up in the debate.

I will talk briefly now, though, about environmental rights. Although I’m disappointed that this bill is so narrowly defined and so restricted in its effect, I note that even in this limited version of human rights, there is established international case law on the connection between environmental rights and human rights. For example, from the right to life we can derive many of the needs to support healthy functioning complex ecosystems and biodiversity. Judge Weeremantry’s separate opinion in the Gabcikovov-Nagymaros case in Hungary v Slovakia in 1997, was that:

The protection of the environment is…a vital part of contemporary human rights doctrine. For it is a sin qua non for numerous human rights such as the right to health—

Which sadly we will not yet have legislated in the ACT—

and the right to health itself. It is scarcely necessary to elaborate this, as damage to the environment can impair and undermine all the human rights spoken of in the Universal Declaration and other human rights instruments.

The Australian Centre for Environmental Law at the ANU quoted this and other cases in its submission to the bill of rights consultative committee. That the health of the natural environment is fundamental to all we do is being brought home to us more and more as we see climate change progressing. We should not need instruments that require us to be mindful of the effects of all of our actions on the balances in the environment, but it seems that we do. A number of international statements relate to the needs of the environment. Agenda 21, for example, sets out a program for change. There is the Rio Declaration. Text could be used from the convention on biological diversity for example.

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