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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Tuesday, 2 March 2004) . . Page.. 462 ..

the mass murderers for decades. As things stand it still is, and looks as if it will continue to be so unless someone has the courage to ensure they abide by their grand bits of paper. That’s the reality with which we live, a reality in which no proliferation of bits of paper will ever ensure rights. The only thing that can ensure rights is a community, and the level of rights enjoyed by a community depends on the quality of the community and of its leadership, on its commonly held traditions, values, beliefs, knowledge, wisdom and sense of equality and fairness, usually evolved over a long and sometimes arduous process. So far that is the system that has delivered the best for us. It is like a vibrant living thing that has grown with us over many centuries and is part of what we are. It has been created by the community itself in order to maintain the continuity and wellbeing of the community and, most significantly, it has not been imposed upon the community in the way this proposed legislation seems bent on imposing itself—and with a little help from its friends.

We have entered very serious times. The assassins are abroad again, having been resurrected by the persistent failure and continuing backwardness of the societies that have scorned them. They wallow in envy, resentment and a sense of victimhood, abetted by those in societies like ours who posture behind platitudes. Being merely sideline critics who won’t get onto the field themselves, they limit their participation to braying at those on the field who are making decisions and shouldering responsibilities. Nothing is ever right for them. In their arrogance they falsely assume an expertise knowing that they will not be called upon to test it out where the going is a bit tougher. Those who sit on the sideline talk of dialogue, of alternative methods of so-called conflict resolution, though they never spell out what those methods might be. They speak of dialogue. Dialogue with whom? With the assassins? How could that be possible? How would it be possible to engage in a dialogue with pure hatred made flesh?

By the same token, how will the existence of lists of rights influence the conduct of those who permit no rights to anyone, anywhere, anytime, to whom mass, indiscriminate killing is as natural as taking a drink of water? That’s who we are dealing with today, within our society as well as outside it. That is our overriding concern now because this is the direction from which the extermination of rights will come. Yet while the assassins are out and about festooning the walls of buildings and cafes and footpaths and fences, and wedding gowns and schoolbags and branches of trees, and rosebushes throughout the world, with bits of flesh and brains and tatters of rags and babies’ bracelets and booties, we are comfortably engaging in what I have to say is an exercise in little more than self-aggrandisement while at the same time, and at every turn, day in and day out, the sniping goes on against the democratically elected national government that is obliged under its mandate to do all that is practicable to ensure the security of the nation and its people.

Among the tools needed for the arduous task of national security, no doubt for quite some time to come, are the legal means to step up security measures to undertake surveillance to identify likely threats, to take suspects into custody and hold them there, to conduct searches and so on—fundamental security measures that any sensible person would feel comforted to see in place, the sort of essential measures that seem invariably to send the more extreme civil libertarians into a frothing frenzy. We have a right to protect ourselves vigorously, even aggressively if needs be, and we need the means to do that. The introduction of a bill of rights such as that being proposed would, as is evident in the comments of Premier Carr cited above, introduce a frustrating obstacle to the performance of basic security functions designed to enable the responsible authorities, on

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