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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 09 Hansard (Wednesday, 18 August 2004) . . Page.. 3884 ..

of course, no-one did anything. So much for a lovely caring society in Europe where, I would have thought, the scourge of anti-Semitism should still be foremost in the minds of a lot of people there—especially in Germany, with what was practised under the Nazis, but also in countries like France and Belgium. All of those countries have Bills of Rights.

Rights cannot exist without responsibility, says the Chief Minister. That is absolutely so. That is exactly what I am saying. They cannot, hence this bill. As I said earlier, if you do not like the clause about this taking precedence, change it. But rights cannot exist without responsibilities. I am saying that that is why you need this. The Chief Minister also states that codes of conduct are better for professions, that they should have just codes of conducts. You do not need those in here. They cannot be exhaustive, they cannot be inclusive of everything. You cannot put everything into a bill like this, and you cannot put everything into the Human Rights Act. Somewhere in the Human Rights Act it says that it is not exhaustive, that it does not cover all rights.

Neither does this. This does not purport to; this purports to have a go at some fairly sensible fundamental responsibilities people have—to be good neighbours, to be good citizens and to care for each other. People in the Labor Party, the Greens and the Democrats completely missed the point: you cannot govern good behaviour, you should have codes of conduct that are better elsewhere. I tend to agree with that but for the Chief Minister to use that argument against this bill is effectively to use that argument against his own bill because they are just so intertwined.

Rights and responsibilities should be so intertwined. If you cannot legislate responsibilities, you cannot really legislate rights either. That is why the opposition opposes the bill of rights and that is why with all our conventions, the way our laws have developed and the change in the nature of our laws, the ACT would be far better off without a bill of rights and we would not need to go down the path of legislation like this to balance it. The Chief Minister effectively has some real problems with his own act by using those very arguments against this bill. He also says it does not deal with humans. Well, it does. Clause 5 in part 2 states:

Who has civil responsibilities?

Individuals have civil responsibilities.

This deals with people, just like the Human Rights Act. Everyone has a responsibility to respect other people, et cetera. Then the Chief Minister touched on one thing that both the Democrats and the Greens started harping about as if it were some dreadful thing that we should all hate. That is, clause 1 (2) in part 1.1:

Everyone should respect people who hold a position of authority.

When Ms Tucker raised it, I said read subclause (3):

People who hold a position of trust and authority in our community are required to show respect towards others, and must have ethical standards and serve the truth.

Those statements are absolutely basic. People should respect people in authority and those in authority should do the right thing by the people they have to deal with. They

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