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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Tuesday, 2 March 2004) . . Page.. 507 ..

decide that for the sake of the community poker machines and alcohol should not be available at, say, an indigenous clubhouse. In other words the rights of the individual to drink alcohol or gamble would, in these circumstances, be considered a lower order matter than the health of the community and the safeguarding of the children.

I shall be interested to hear the Chief Minister’s response to this because, from my understanding of something that I read in the newspaper today, no-one in the government has had the courtesy so far to reply to Bishop Browning’s letter. Perhaps they will have the decency to respond.

Ms Gallagher: Except me.

MR CORNWELL: You acknowledged it—I apologise, Ms Gallagher; thank you—but not in detail, I suspect, and therefore I will be asking the Chief Minister, and I would hope, when he winds up this debate, he will have the decency and courtesy to respond to those matters.

It is, therefore, of concern to me that we have this piece of legislation before us. I was thinking about it earlier because I had taken a note some weeks ago, on 18 November when the US ambassador was here. He made an interesting point, which I think is germane to this legislation because it is germane to this debate. In 1939, there were 12 democracies in the world. In the 1970s there were something like 40. In the 2000s there are something like 120 democracies. I suggest to you that the majority of these democracies—having risen, as I said, from 12 in 1939 to 120 in the 2000s—do not have a bill of rights, Chief Minister. I would think, in fact, that they are managing quite well as democracies so as not to bother with such an unnecessary, expensive, time-consuming piece of paper. Well, it is a not a piece of paper; it will be a very thick collection of papers, I suppose.

I suggest that the people of the ACT do not need this legislation. It is a desire, I suspect, of the Chief Minister rather than the Labor Party. I believe that it is one of these fetishes that he has from time to time about human rights. He is entitled to that view, but he is not entitled to force this type of thing on 320,000 citizens of this territory. And my advice to them is to be frightened—very, very frightened.

MS DUNDAS (5.12): The ACT Democrats are proud to support the introduction of the Human Rights Bill here in the Assembly. The Democrats have a solid commitment to human rights. We have a long-held policy supporting the establishment of a federal bill of rights, and we support the recognition of human rights at the state and territory level. We believe that a charter of rights is essential as a means of promoting democratic freedoms, collectively in terms of social justice issues and individually in terms of personal rights and freedoms. Without a comprehensive charter of rights, there is insufficient entrenched protection for the basic civil liberties and human rights of citizens from the will of the government of the day.

There has been a lot of debate already about why we need a human rights bill or even a bill of rights, and I think there are some very simple answers to that at the moment. The common law and our system of government do not offer adequate protection against the abuse of human rights. There are no guarantees that future governments will respect

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