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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 09 Hansard (Wednesday, 18 August 2004) . . Page.. 3881 ..

high water, what is most important—protecting the individual’s rights? Is that more important than the community greater good, the community responsibility? Should there not at least be a balance to make sure that both the individual’s rights and responsibility for the community’s greater good are also protected?

Teachers are responsible for pursuing excellence and developing good character. Teachers are responsible for being role models. Teachers are responsible for inculcating values in schools, and these sorts of responsibilities need to be codified. The courts are clearly responsible for upholding the rights of the individual but the courts are also responsible for ensuring that victims are protected or that victims receive some sort of recourse. The courts are responsible for laying down, where necessary, deterrents to ensure that lessons are learnt and that crimes are not repeated. At times we wonder whether those sorts of issues are being dealt with closely enough.

A bill of responsibilities would enshrine the need for courts to make sure they take into account the community greater good in their determinations. What about all of us? We all have a responsibility to place our national and community interests, the essence of the collective good, well above our own individual rights, well above the perceived rights of any minority lobbies and at least on a par with the individual rights of others that we may be seeking to represent. So, if we are seeking to represent an individual, as officers of the court, as MLAs, as politicians, as policemen, as lawyers, as captains, as teachers or as coaches, we have a responsibility to make sure that the responsibility to protect the greater good is taken into account as well as the rights of the individual that we may be pursuing.

The Chief Minister’s bill of rights has been a damned failure. It just was not made to fly. It is not designed to advance our society or to advance the true rights of each of us as individuals. How can the bill of rights protect the rights of the individual if it undermines the greater responsibility that we all have in protecting the greater good? This bill of rights allows the great weight of effort, often politicised effort, to go in the direction of selected individuals at the expense of the greater majority.

Today the Democrats, as usual, have demonstrated that they too are mesmerised by the bill of rights, and the libertarianism that this represents, as far more dazzling, far more exciting and far more important than the need for collective and individual responsibility aimed at advancing the community’s natural interest. How naive and irresponsible are the Democrats when it comes to understanding and advancing the macro, the greater, good. Perhaps that is a function of their narrow, interest-based tunnel vision. What about the responsibility of all us to pull our own weight, to take care of the vulnerable, to protect the weak, to aim for the stars to advance our society? Where is the vision?

Given the irresponsible and careless inaction by this government, and the jaundiced view by the Democrats and others, on rights over responsibilities, clearly there is a need to legislate a code of responsibilities that enshrines our responsibilities so that when our kids go to school they learn initially, immediately, that they have responsibilities to pull their weight in society. In the rat race that we all live in, with the pressures that modernity brings, we do not have that same instinct to worry about the greater good. More than ever before a bill of responsibilities is required to keep reminding us that we all have responsibilities and that these responsibilities are far more important than individual rights.

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