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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Thursday, 5 August 2004) . . Page.. 3559 ..

As a result of that uncertainty the government has brought forward this bill to overcome those remaining difficulties. It clarifies the words “members of a relevant class of people” in subsection 27 (1) and changes subsection 27 (2) to bring in the test of reasonableness. This makes the threshold level of what constitutes unlawful discrimination in section 27 consistent with what is in the rest of the act. The effect of the bill is to ensure that people who are entitled to special services have the same right as the rest of the community to make a discrimination complaint about the services they receive.

It is a reasonably simple bill, which the opposition are happy to support. We would only wish that the government showed some consistency in dealing with issues such as this. Unlike the government, we do not have any problems supporting sensible measures that improve legislation, and it is a shame that the government is set to reject our sensible bill, which we are debating cognately.

MS DUNDAS (5.50): I will address my comments to both the discrimination amendment bills before us. Whilst the Assembly supports the idea of debating them cognately, I note that the bills address different issues in relation to discrimination law. The ACT Democrats are happy to support the government’s bill, but we cannot support the opposition’s bill.

The government’s bill clarifies the intention of section 27 of the Discrimination Act. This section has had something of a checkered history, as in previous wording it was interpreted to mean that any service or facility provided to address equal opportunity was effectively given a blanket exemption from the Discrimination Act. That meant that a service such as a program dedicated to assisting women enter the workforce would be exempt from all provisions of the Discrimination Act, meaning that it could discriminate on other relevant characteristics—for example, disability.

This was never the intention of section 27, and the act was changed in 1999 to try and clarify this. However, the change stated that services could still be exempt from the act if they could demonstrate that the discrimination was not irrelevant to the program. This particular wording has continued to cause concern in the community sector, particularly in the disability sector, where it is believed that it is far too easy to show that discrimination is not irrelevant. Relevance is a fairly easy concept to demonstrate.

The government proposes to substitute the concept of relevance for the concept of reasonableness. This means that a service may only be exempt from the Discrimination Act if that discrimination is reasonable for the purposes of ensuring that equal opportunity exists. ACTCOSS welcomed these changes, after continuously bringing them to the government’s attention. I am happy to support the government’s bill, and I commend it for finally correcting this issue, which has long been a source of concern in the community.

However, turning now to Mr Stefaniak’s bill, the Democrats cannot support this proposal. Our current discrimination laws are based on equal opportunity. Mr Stefaniak has raised the point that, even where there is equal opportunity to work in a profession, there are not always equal outcomes. I agree that this is true. Where we see glaringly

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