Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Tuesday, 2 March 2004) . . Page.. 456 ..

community. This legislation is a statement of those rights. It’s enabling a dialogue about those rights when there is concern that those rights are being breached. I’m proud to be supporting it even though it is in a very limited form at this point.

MR PRATT (11.48): I support Mr Stefaniak’s argument against the bill of rights to indicate why I believe the bill of rights is absolutely unnecessary and, indeed, damaging. Magna Carta, and of course later William of Orange’s bill of rights of 1688, set in train a very solid foundation in the western democratic system for the enshrinement of rights. The legal system that developed through those centuries was inherited by our forefathers. That system went to great lengths to protect the rights of Australian residents. From that inherited system we in this country enjoy one of the best systems of rights in the world. When one looks at the rights that we enjoy here, and have always enjoyed, compared to the rights of people around the world, I wonder what we are whinging about here today.

There are people around the world who don’t even have the right to eat. There are people in other countries who don’t have a society which is able to deliver them the right to be protected in their villages, their towns and their districts. They don’t even have the right to live in safety because they don’t have the good governance provisions in place for a safe society. Therefore, a bill of rights is superfluous. What we’re arguing here is that Australian citizens enjoy excellent rights and we have good systems in place that don’t need to be added to or tampered with. We don’t need any value adding. A bill of rights will introduce another layer of bureaucracy. It will introduce yet another system of law. It will add to the lantana which is Australia’s legal fabric. We don’t need that extra layer of mechanism. It will be costly, it will be time-consuming, it would tie up the courts, it would tie up court time and tie up the time of lawyers.

There are two other matters here. Such a bill and such an extra layer of law will be manipulated by lawyers pursuing political objectives. We will see the parliamentary process circumvented by political lobby groups and legal lobby groups with axes to grind. We’ll see the Stephen Hoppers in Australia tying up valuable court time pursuing spurious issues and taking away from the courts the time needed to focus on fundamental rights issue. We’ll see a litigation culture develop. As Mr Stefaniak said earlier, this will encourage a stronger litigation culture, a culture which will be even more destructive to the fabric of our society, a sort of culture where only lawyers and particular lobby groups benefit but people don’t. All persons have a responsibility to be law-abiding citizens, to be loyal to their country and their community and to pull their weight in society. They all have a responsibility to lend a hand to those in the community who need help or who are vulnerable. That is already enshrined in our society, those dynamics are already there. The fundamental dynamic of good society has been gradually eroded over recent years and replaced by a culture of gimme my rights. I could sing that, but I won’t. A certain selfishness has eroded the fabric of society. Now the Chief Minister wants to throw petrol on that fire. For his own selfish and naive political reasons he wants to enshrine this gimme my rights culture.

The bill of rights will remove the power of responsibility and powers away from the elected legislature and will give to an unelected judiciary, our Supreme Court, powers that it doesn’t necessarily need. The courts will become like honey pots to the irresponsibly politically driven legal fraternity that I just discussed a few minutes ago. Courts will then be able to make judgments on such spurious causes which otherwise would not deserve the time, energy and cost that they will attract. Important community

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .