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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Tuesday, 2 March 2004) . . Page.. 463 ..

behalf of the community that tasks and sustains them, to do the utmost to protect the community from menace. I’m certain that if they were to do less than their utmost to protect the community, they would be subjected to denunciation by the very people who work to reduce their capacity to provide that protection, that is, the carping, self-righteous know-alls.

On this quite critical matter, I draw attention to an item that recently appeared in the paper regarding the recently proposed changes to internal security laws to allow holding of a suspect for 48 hours instead of 24 in cases where language problems would require the use of interpreters. One Professor Rothwell of Sydney university said that the amendments would be a clear contravention of article 26 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, which says that all persons are equal before the law and prohibits discrimination on the basis of language among other things. He added:

It would seem to me that inserting a provision into Australian law which would allow for someone who doesn’t have English as a first language to be subject to a maximum of 48 hours of interrogation and questioning…is a clear distinction or discrimination, and would therefore be a clear breach of the convention.

He went on to suggest that any Australians subject to those laws would have a right to complain to the human rights committee. On the other hand, the government has said it has checked and the amendment does not breach the covenant, adding that the human rights committee has repeatedly explained that differential treatment is not discriminating “so long as the distinction in treatment is based on objective and reasonable criteria”. It looks to me like Professor Rothwell’s hobbyhorse just fell over. I conclude this comment by explaining what to any person with half a wit would, on the basis of grade two arithmetic, constitute objective and reasonable criteria in this case. With an English-speaking suspect, the conversation involves only two people. Speaker A directly to speaker B then back to speaker A. That is two-way. Where an interpreter is involved, the conversation goes like this: speaker A to interpreter to speaker B, to interpreter and back to speaker A. That makes four links instead of two. By an elaborate process of deduction which is apparently beyond the intellectual capacity of our ever so concerned Professor Rothwell, the conclusion can fairly confidently be drawn that exchanges involving an interpreter will take twice as long as those directly between two people, thus requiring an increase from 24 to 48 hours. It seems pretty logical to me. (Further extension of time granted.)

The most worrying part of this little demonstration of stupidity by a man who was referred to in the article as an international law expert is what I guess is a bit of politicisation of what is nothing more than a practical measure to anyone who is not one-eyed. That is what I fear from the rights trumpeters in our present serious times, when those responsible for ensuring our security need effective tools to keep us secure. Whatever makes that task harder for them to perform is counterproductive, and serves the menace we confront, and I am against it. One can’t expect people to carry out such critical tasks properly if there are those like our good professor waiting for every opportunity to hobble them. I foresee in this present obsession with rights, as opposed to responsibilities and obligations, the potential for the incessant intrusion of judicial activism, whether it succeeds or not to a degree where it will hinder rather than help the efficient and timely conduct of legal proceedings as it has done for some years now. We

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