Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Tuesday, 3 August 2004) . . Page.. 3302 ..

mental health over and over again. I make the point that whenever we have this discussion about how we can take control of people’s lives, we have to look at how we can avoid having to do that.

MS DUNDAS (11.26): The ACT Democrats will also be adding their support to the bill today, but we do it very carefully, with consideration of the human rights of the people that we are talking about potentially detaining. We need to ensure that when considering this kind of legislation we are limiting any infringement of the human rights of the mentally dysfunctional to the minimum degree necessary for their care and protection.

The aim of this bill is simple. It is to allow the Mental Health Tribunal to order a person who is mentally dysfunctional to be detained in a specified place in order to prevent harm to that person or harm to the community, or a continued deterioration of that person’s condition. This bill also makes a number of structural changes to the Mental Health (Treatment and Care) Act to make it more accessible to workers in the sector and to clarify the intention of the act. In addition, it clarifies the relationship between the Powers of Attorney Act and the Mental Health (Treatment and Care) Act to remove any potential for conflict between those two pieces of legislation.

These clarifications recognise that the bill must not only be interpreted by those with a background in law, but also by health professionals who are required to abide by the provisions of the act when administering health care to people. The clear separation of the roles of the chief psychiatrist and the care co-ordinator in this bill is a recognition that the current act can be confusing, and that the roles of these two statutory positions in our mental health system need to be separated in order to facilitate greater understanding of their distinct positions.

I acknowledge that the bill has been drafted in response to a number of concerns in the mental health sector. For example, there are reserved beds in a secure facility for the treatment of somebody with a mental dysfunction, but they are unable to be properly utilised due to the wording of the current law. That being said, the bill raises a whole host of issues regarding human rights that the Assembly must consider carefully. The bill potentially infringes on a number of rights contained in the Human Rights Act, such as section 13, the right to freedom of movement, and section 18, the right to liberty and security of a person. At the same time, section 28 of the Human Rights Act states:

Human rights may be subject only to reasonable limits set by Territory Laws that can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

The Scrutiny of Bills Committee has drawn to the attention of this Assembly these issues. In report 52 it made the following comments:

No doubt the provisions of this Bill could be the subject of a very detailed study of whether its provisions conform to the standards stated in the Human Rights Act 2004. This is far beyond the time available to the Committee.

The Committee appreciates that assessment of whether the Bill meets the general standards stated by bodies such as the European Court and the HRC cannot be carried out without the study of the Act as it would be amended, and knowledge of how the Act is carried out in practice.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .