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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Tuesday, 2 March 2004) . . Page.. 510 ..

Much as I am in favour of people having rights, I am also concerned that we are becoming a lopsided society in which there are no corresponding responsibilities; the weight of the scales is going madly the other way. Of course people need to have rights and there are elements within our community that are very hard done by. We need to give them greater support, not to have some brave new legislation that we do not really know where the dickens it is going to take us. World experiences are now showing that the situation is slowly becoming a disaster in a lot of the areas that this bill purports to help.

I think we do need to get one thing straight and to have the comment placed on the public record: the bill of rights has not been requested by the majority of ACT residents. In fact, the opposition requested that a territory-wide plebiscite be held on the issue. However, the idea was dismissed out of hand by the government; it would not even consider that.

I have pulled together a few relevant comments made by the Chief Minister over past months and they are interesting. He said that the government will not impose a bill of rights on Canberra. Really? My research is telling me that many people are just throwing their hands up in the air and saying, “What’s the point as he is not going to listen anyway? He will just do what he wants to do. He has the numbers in the Assembly to do that and he can go ahead and do it.” People in the broad community are very concerned. Perhaps the Chief Minister is not listening to those people.

Mr Stanhope made that comment In a media release on Wednesday, 3 April 2002, Mr Stanhope said:

A decision on whether we should proceed has to be tested in discussion with the community, and that is one of the roles of Professor Charlesworth’s committee.

I dare say that that was just a lip-service comment. It surely has turned out to be that. The discussion with the community has not been a huge success, according to many writers and observers. If you are going to have something like that you should be honest and have proper consultation. Do not just pay lip-service to it and say, “We’ve consulted.”

A gentleman by the name of George Williams suggested in a Saturday edition of the Canberra Times in, I think, November that there was apparent majority support for a bill of rights on the basis of the consultative committee’s submissions process and a deliberative poll. However, only the tiniest proportion of Canberrans would have even contemplated making a submission to the committee and the statistical validity of deliberate polling remains controversial. Those comments were by courtesy of Jason Briant, who is the executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.

Furthermore, Williams neglected to mention that apparently only approximately 120 people in total—that’s right, 120 people in total—could be bothered to go along to all of the community meetings also held as part of the consultative process. I understand that somewhere there was a little chart and a Powerpoint presentation at which we were told that thousands of people—I think it was about 1 per cent of the population in total, about 2,500 or 3,500 people—had actually been asked in some way or another. I would like to know what the questions were. We all know about trying to get the outcome that

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