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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Tuesday, 2 March 2004) . . Page.. 571 ..

I have been given assurances by the officials that an education campaign will be undertaken with the judiciary—hopefully that will extend to the legal profession—so that people understand the point. They have to interpret the act against the Attorney-General’s speech. You really have to do some work to bring all the pieces together. I think that is one of the failings of the bill as such.

If you have the luck to have the bill explained to you by the capable person who wrote it or brought it together and you have the copy of the speech, you know about the ICCPR and you have the act, then it is okay—maybe. The problem is that not all people have the facilities available to them at all times. I had some fears that people might use clause 16 (2) as an excuse to justify anything they might do, but I have been told that there will be a lot of education to ensure that that does not happen. But that is after you ask.

Perhaps the failing of the entire bill is that you have to bring a lot of things together to enable an understanding of it, because it is not clear how this legislation will work. That is why we would be fundamentally opposed to such an act, because these rights and principles are enshrined in other places and we see this as superfluous. However, clause 28 does come out to be a very important clause in the bill and members need to understand exactly what it does in the way it enables the rest of the act to work.

MRS DUNNE (11.02): I have to echo much of what my colleague, Mr Smyth, has said because this is a problem about making all the moving parts fit together. As Mr Smyth has said, in some ways clause 28 is in fact a limiting valve. I will deal with clause 30 at greater length later. The Chief Minister said in his introductory speech in clause 28 that nothing overrides existing laws but, at the same time, clause 30 (3) (b) says that, by working out the meaning of a territory law, you can confirm or displace the apparent meaning of a law.

These are things we have to be particularly concerned about. There are a whole lot of moving parts and, sometimes when the cogs all come together, it is pretty discordant and the gears do not work. A problem will be created for the judiciary and for people throughout the legal system attempting to interpret these laws, because clause 28 says one thing and clause 30 (3) (b) says something slightly different, which is contradictory.

Clauses 28 and 29 agreed to.

Clause 30.

MR STANHOPE (Chief Minister, Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment and Minister for Community Affairs) (11.04): Mr Speaker, I move the amendment circulated in my name and table an explanatory statement [see schedule 4 at page 604].

The purpose of these amendments is to make clause 30 easier to read and understand. It is to make it as clear as possible that, while we expect the judiciary to read rights into statutory provisions, they may not override the clear intention of the Assembly to legislate inconsistently with human rights. The amendment to clause 31 includes the words “is as far as possible”. This picks up the language used in the United Kingdom Human Rights Act and provides some nuance to the existing clause.

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