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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Tuesday, 2 March 2004) . . Page.. 458 ..

rights of this assailant’s victim? What about the rights of this poor old man’s widow? Where is the government’s plan to protect the victims of crime? No such programs focus on the fundamental defence of the rights of victims because they are being shoved aside in favour of the spurious actions of this government to produce a bill of rights because it is far more important for the Stanhope Government to dabble in boutique leftist programs upholding the rights of criminal victims than it is to enshrine the defence of the rights of the greater majority.

MRS CROSS (11.58): When the Chief Minister presented this bill last November he said among other things that “Australia is a human rights backwater”. How unfair a comment to make about a country that is acknowledged as one of the world’s leading successful democracies and as one of the two most successful modern multicultural societies in the world. I find this endless sowing of divisiveness at every speech-making occasion disturbing in a responsible civic leader. On the same occasion the Chief Minister said that development of the bill benefited from the experience of comparable jurisdictions such as New Zealand and so forth. Is this meant to be a trump card? Is this some sign of endorsement from a wider membership of the international community? Whatever it means, it makes the assumption that what New Zealand and the other countries have done has turned out to be some sort of ideal. You wouldn’t cite the country if you didn’t think that. Let’s look at the reaction from another responsible civic leader to one of the effects of the New Zealand bill of rights:

In New Zealand, in the first seven years after the Bill of Rights was enacted, it was invoked by the accused in literally thousands of criminal law cases…[and it] continues to be routinely used as a ground for attempting to overturn the admissibility of evidence, including confessions, evidence obtained under search warrants, and breath-testing of drunk drivers.

It was Bob Carr, Premier of New South Wales, who made that comment after a thorough study of the benefit and practical usefulness of a bill of rights. Let me now relate a pertinent anecdote or two—first one from Premier Carr:

An Australian prisoner went to court a few years ago claiming his human rights were violated under the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights. What was his complaint? There was not enough choice in the prison’s vegetarian menu. What do you think the outcome was? Well, the court threw it out. Under Australian law the treaty was unenforceable.

In other words, the Australian law was able to recognise clear idiocy. Now for something initiated in Queensland a few months ago. You might know of a notorious armed robber called Brendan Abbott, an extremely dangerous person and violent escapee from prison in 1977—a man facing 25 years in jail. In short, not someone who could normally expect to be treated in other than a strict way and within appropriate guidelines. If his name does not ring a bell you may recognise him by his nickname, the postcard bandit. At present he is in solitary confinement, which, under Queensland criminal law, can be imposed on that state’s most dangerous criminals subject to six-monthly reviews. Mr Abbott does not wish to be in solitary confinement, he doesn’t like that at all. He is not too happy about that. What is this vicious bandit doing about it? Obviously Queensland’s criminal law is no good to him because it won’t do what he wants. So he has sent his lawyer off to no lesser body than the United Nations to complain that Abbott is a political prisoner and is being subjected to harsh and inhumane treatment. What was the

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