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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Tuesday, 2 March 2004) . . Page.. 508 ..

human rights. There are currently very few restrictions on the laws that the government can pass if it has the numbers. I believe that this Assembly does need to enshrine in some legislation what we believe needs to be embodied as a bill of rights so that people can look up to this document and work with this document to see that their rights are protected, along with all the other laws here in the ACT. A charter of rights and freedoms, or the Human Rights Bill that we debate today, is a human rights safety net. We should see it as a shield to help protect people and enable citizens to know what their rights are and to exercise their freedoms underneath them.

Some points have been put forward that there is no need to have this bill of rights because our rights, even though they are not written down anywhere, are protected because we live in a healthy and safe democracy. Well, some of the submissions that came forward to the Bill of Rights Consultative Committee challenged that fact, and I will share some of them with members so that they can hear from those people who are concerned that their rights are not being protected. The report states:

The Welfare Rights and Legal Centre and Tenants’ Union ACT told the Consultative Committee that there were a number of areas in which existing ACT laws were not sufficient to protect the most vulnerable. It identified seven principle areas of concern including: the rights of those with a disability; the rights of Indigenous Australians; the rights of refugees; the rights of women; children and young people’s rights…issues relating to housing; and rights of prisoners.

A number of people put forward issues in relation to indigenous Australians and how their rights are not respected in the same way as those of others are. An important comment that was made to the committee was from Val Pawagi, who referred the consultative committee to the Gallop inquiry and said that the Gallop inquiry had “found that the rights of people with [a] disability living in group houses have not been adequately or effectively protected by the policies and systems operating in the ACT”.

So within the last five years people in the ACT have had their rights infringed or not properly protected, and that is why we have the Human Rights Bill before us, to address those concerns, to work to ensure that those people who are most vulnerable, who need this protection, can have it afforded to them. That is why I am proud to stand up and support the Human Rights Bill that is before us today. But I would like to say that I think this bill does not go far enough. Especially considering the thorough evaluation and consultation process that was undertaken by the ACT Bill of Rights Consultative Committee, I think we have ended up with a bill that includes only a subset of the human rights clauses recommended by the consultative committee, so the bill will have only limited effect on the rights of ACT residents.

The positive thing about this bill is that it makes it very clear to everyone that our rights are being taken away when this happens as a result of a new law. We will have the discussion and consultation under the Human Rights Bill about every new piece of legislation. This is better than nothing but it falls far short of the promise offered by the consultation process for an ACT bill of rights. So I will be putting forward quite a number of amendments, which I will speak more about at the detail stage, that seek to expand the set of rights created by the bill, to include the rights in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

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